Hope this isn't a dupe. Did a quick search of LBN and didn't find it. It's a long, but really good (IMHO) article on the march yesterday.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH31Aa03.htmlsnip>
Given the months of intimidation - the Bush administration Code Orange alert, the endless discussions of possible terrorist acts, the hair-raising statements of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki, the highly publicized showing off of new police weaponry and tactics of a sort fit for a police state, the regular labeling of the New York Police Department as larger than all but 19 militaries in the world, the rumors that the world's most dangerous anarchists were headed our way, and so on - given the attempts, that is, to scare protesters out of town, this was a march you had to think about. You had to make a decision to attend. You had to have a reason (or multiple reasons) for coming. When asked, marchers tended to stress the "seriousness" of the moment and to suggest a sense of being at the edge of a volcano.
It was hardly an upbeat crowd, but it was certainly a determined one. When, right in front of Madison Square Garden where the convention was scheduled to begin the next day, a giant, papier-mache green dragon was doused with gasoline and set on fire, perhaps by the small group that had been inside it - a dangerous and malicious act - and police on motorcycles, horses, and scooters as well as on foot with billy clubs at the ready and plastic handcuffs in quantity attached to their pants' legs, promptly closed in, shut the march down, made a few arrests, and looked ready to end things right there, a man near me exclaimed, "This election is the end. It's the last one. I don't think we can survive this election!" But the marchers who had not already passed the Garden waited with determination until, to shouts from the sidewalks of "Whose streets! Our streets!" the police moved aside. Then they simply marched on.
snip>
Since articles on demonstrations, whether in the mainstream or the alternative press, tend to be short on the voices of the actual demonstrators - and since almost to a person those I talked to were thoughtful and articulate about their decisions to demonstrate - I thought I might offer their voices as best I could catch them, perhaps a tad telescoped by my limited ability to scribble stenographically.
Voices from the march
The Republican. When I saw his sign, "Republicans for Kerry/Edwards", bobbing just ahead, I immediately tracked down Henry Engelbrecht, a modest-looking older man in an all-blue outfit topped by a Masonic cap ("Masons Lodge #163, Bernardville, NJ"), marching with a group called Somerset County Voices for Peace. He was, he told me, a merchant-marine vet from World War II. "I'm an elected Republican districtman from my district in Somerset County, New Jersey. In the last election, I worked very hard for Bush. On phone banks. I contributed financially. I persuaded people to vote. But I slowly turned against the Bush administration and particularly George Bush because of the terrible lies. The WMD
lies. They all lied, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the rest of the cabinet, to fortify their decision to attack Iraq. We lost all those wonderful young men for those rotten lies."
much more...