Tony Aman was canoeing the Allagash Wilderness Waterway with a friend on Sept. 11, 2001, and blissfully unaware for the next two days that terrorist attacks had ushered in our new age of terrorism.

As the tragic aftermath unfolded and the bombs began to rain down on Afghanistan, he fretted about the nature of a war that could have no foreseeable end, and about the roots of a desperate, anti-American hatred so intense as to bring civilization to this terrible threshold.

“And it eventually occurred to me that the brief period of goodwill that the world had shown to us after the attacks would soon be squandered,” Aman said recently. “I knew that our president would continue to seek revenge.”

Within a year, his suspicions were borne out with alarming speed as President Bush began to invoke the name Saddam Hussein, the “immediate” threat he posed to the United States, and his implied connections to the 9-11 attacks.

Aman’s anti-war sensibilities, which began to emerge while he was a left-leaning college theater student in his native Ohio, increasingly were fueled as he steeped himself in news reports from the alternative press that abound on the Internet and in the writings of such authors as George Orwell. Aman’s burgeoning philosophy of nonviolence rejected the notion of a just war, which he was convinced always had been the greatest stumbling block to world peace.

Although he was not a committed member of any of Maine’s many peace activist organizations, he began to organize small gatherings near his coastal home in Penobscot, hoping to find others who shared his frustrations and anger over what he believed was the Bush administration’s deceptive, arrogant, uncompromising and thoroughly unjust march to war with Iraq.

“The more information you have, and the more aware you become, the more you realize you can no longer sit back and do nothing,” he said. “You have to find a way to express yourself.”

Aman soon found all the like-minded company he could have hoped for. Certain there would be a war in Iraq, a pre-emptive invasion that he found ethically, politically and economically indefensible, Aman asked a gathering at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Ellsworth if anyone would be interested in holding a statewide rally for peace.

The response was overwhelming, and Aman, an insurance agent and investment adviser, threw himself into his role as activist organizer. In late October 2002, the “Stop the War Now” rally in Augusta drew an estimated 3,000 people, who marched in the streets and stood in the cold rain for hours to listen to anti-war speeches and protest music.

In the crowd that day were Maine’s more-familiar longtime activists as well as a significant number of newcomers to the protest movement, people who felt compelled to speak out against what they perceived was the administration’s reckless response to terrorism, its misguided economic and foreign policies, and the threat to civil liberty posed by the Patriot Act.

“The greatest satisfaction in being a part of a protest march is realizing that you’re not alone,” said Aman. “There is a sense of collective consciousness that is palpable and concrete.”

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Baghdad one year ago, rallies and vigils large and small have continued throughout the state, at churches, highway overpasses, town squares and federal buildings. At the same time, the

“Support the Troops” rallies that sprang up as a counterpoint to the protest message presented the picture of a state deeply divided not only on the always contentious issue of war but on the very meaning of patriotism.

“When I started protesting, the day the war started in Iraq, I was called everything from pinko-fag-Communist to worse,” said Bob McElwain, a Vietnam War veteran who helped found the Greater Bangor Area Veterans for Peace. “I felt that my patriotism was being questioned, and my right to hold the American flag. At first, I would yell back at people, but I soon realized that was not the way to go. Instead, I wrote ‘Peaceful Dialogue Welcomed,’ on the back of my sign, and lots of people starting taking me up on the invitation.”

McElwain, whose son-in-law has been stationed with the Army in Iraq for 10 months, said he has on occasion joined the troop greeters at Bangor International Airport to show his support for his military brothers and sisters who have to fight and die in a war that he cannot justify.

“I tell them I’m there to support them, too, and that I’m also working hard to get them out of there,” he said.

Yet protesters such as McElwain and lifelong peace activist Ilze Petersons said they’ve noticed a subtle though heartening change lately in the way the public perceives them as they stand vigil on the streets. They believe that more and more people are questioning the war, and some even turning against it now that the Bush administration’s initial motives for invading Iraq have been discredited in the last few months.

Whereas a protest sign reading “Honk for Peace” earlier might have elicited a chorus of jeers and the angry flashing of middle fingers from passers-by, they say, it now is as likely to stir a gratifying symphony of horns.

“It’s unprecedented, in my experience,” said Petersons, who began her peace protests as a college student in Illinois during the Vietnam War. “People feel they’ve been deceived and manipulated by their government, and they feel the need to speak out for the first time. Many have come to understand that this war has not made us safer but less safe, and that spending billions of dollars in Iraq is eating up resources that people desperately need here at home.”

As for Aman, one of the organizers of this weekend’s “March for Truth” in Augusta, peace activism has become more than just a way to show opposition for a war. It’s a way of life.

“We won’t be gathered in Augusta to say that war is bad,” Aman said. “Of course war is bad, and we’d be fools to think we have the power to stop it. We want to use this anniversary to say that war is a symptom of a bigger disease, of a culture of violence and intolerance that doesn’t work, that offers no lasting solutions to anything.”