In the last year, there’s been much rhetoric about the devastating impact that Wall Street has had on Main Street. Massive cuts in employment, health and human services organizations, increased housing foreclosures and bank bailouts headline the news, weighing on each of our minds.

This past weekend, San Diego celebrated its 35th annual Pride, and it appears that Wall Street’s impact has reached all the way to University Avenue. According to local merchants, sales were down by at least 30 percent this year.

But our hats go off to San Diego Pride for creating a safe and secure space for the San Diego GLBT community to celebrate unity and pride.

Were there glitches? Absolutely. When you’re the city’s largest civic event, there always will be. Some have expressed their frustration with the confusion in the parade lineup and gaps in the flow of contingents. We remind these people that there were an estimated 165,000 people lining the streets of Hillcrest on Saturday, and according to our liaison at the San Diego Police Department, there were no incidents reported.

Some have also criticized Pride for raising the entrance fee to the festival from $15 to $20. While we acknowledge that this may have affected attendance to some degree, we cannot lay the blame at the doorstep of Pride alone. We highly doubt Pride organizers intentionally set out to reduce attendance by increasing entrance fees. As nonprofits and other community-based organizations are closing their doors at record rates, it seems a small price to pay to make sure the event would break even.

Further, we must remember in a time when Sacramento is set to slash funding for services vital to our community – including HIV/AIDS prevention and education services and lesbian health initiatives, for example – events like Pride bring in much needed revenue to support our local agencies so that they can continue to meet the needs of our community.

We also tip our hats to the residents of Hillcrest who endure a great deal of the burden of the weekend in general, but the parade, specifically. Imagine 165,000 people showing up on your doorstep asking if you have an extra parking space or two, and then leaving behind all the remnants of the parade.

Yet, there they were, the residents of Hillcrest and the Hillcrest Clean Team, in the early hours of Monday morning – proudly donning their bright orange shirts, with brooms, buckets, and trashcans in hand – making sure our precious neighborhood was clean.

Come Monday afternoon, those same streets once again bustled with people winding down from their weekend festivities – and bringing precious revenue to our community.

On the pages of this issue, we invite you to reflect on some of the Snapshots of Pride.

Pride is a reminder to us during these tough economic times of how important it is to patronize local businesses. Members of our community are vital to their survival. We’ve already witnessed many closing their doors after decades of service.

So let’s not waste our energy criticizing Pride organizers. Instead, let’s use it to create a world envisioned by those who braved so much to march down University Avenue 35 years ago.

So, once again, thank you to everyone who helped organize and participate in Pride, and who kept our streets safe as we celebrated Stonewall 2.0 and the 35th Anniversary of San Diego’s own Pride.

Along those same lines, we must challenge ourselves to look forward.

Last week, our online poll asked if readers planned on attending the October National March for Equality in Washington, D.C. Seventy-five percent of Gay & Lesbian Times readers said they would not.

This is doubtless less a sign of apathy for the fight for equality than a reflection of the current economic environment. This national event, spearheaded by our own grand marshal and longtime activist Cleve Jones, must be supported. Each of us will have to dig a little deeper, save a little more each week, and begin planning our trek to the nation’s capital to show our strength in numbers, both locally and nationally.

We cannot let the woes of Wall Street – and the prejudices of Main Street – sway us from our path toward equal rights: The road to equality now lies down Pennsylvania Avenue.