The winds blew unrelentingly through 2004 – and not just the tempests that smashed the Atlantic and Gulf coasts again and again.

Gales of war and suffering battered Iraq and the Sudan; political gusts roiled America and Ukraine. And countless squalls – baseball steroid scandals, flu vaccine gone AWOL, Janet Jackson’s bare right breast – left many disoriented and disgruntled.

“We’re overwhelmed, just overwhelmed,” said Al Jackson, a Pensacola firefighter, after Ivan joined Charley and Frances in a lethal procession through Florida, to be followed by Jeanne.

But 2004 was a bewildering year in nearly every way. Rarely have so many people been so overwhelmed, in so many places.

At Camp Kounoungo in Chad, where Mohammed Aziber recalled the moment when his son was gunned down by a helicopter that circled overhead, and how his family then fled their village – joining the accursed 1.8 million refugees from the Sudanese insurgency and counterinsurgency. “Every day, I see my son lying under that tree,” said Aziber, tearfully.

In the Russian town of Beslan, where 34-year-old Georgi Kozarev recounted his part in a mob that lynched one of the terrorists who had launched the bloodbath at a local school, leaving more than 330 dead. “How does one understand this? How do you forgive it?” he asked.

In Omaha, Neb., where Shane Kielion’s high school sweetheart, April, gave birth to their first child – just hours after the Marine rifleman died in the battle for Fallujah. His family’s hearts were stretched from exultation to sorrow.

“It’s time for them to do some healing,” said the father’s old football coach, Jay Ball.

The father Shane Jr. will never know was one more among more than 1,300 American military personnel dead in Iraq. Every day seemed to bring news of more deaths – Iraqis, American troops, hostages like Nicholas Berg, the young American whose severed head was brandished as a trophy by his captors.

Americans showed their support for the troops by affixing magnet ribbons to their SUVs, even as they were appalled by pictures of jaunty GIs humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The war against terrorism entered its fourth year, and Iraq’s rising death toll was not the only bad news. Iran and North Korea flirted with nuclear capabilities and Osama bin Laden, still at large, vilified the United States via video tape. In March, in Madrid, 191 died when four commuter trains blew up almost simulaneously – bombed by militants linked to al-Qaida.

And yet, President Bush could tell the Republican National Convention that “freedom is on the march,” and he had a point.

Even as Iraq tottered shakily toward a Jan. 30, 2005, election, Hamid Karzai became Afghanistan’s first popularly elected president. Yasser Arafat’s death opened the way to Palestinian elections, tantalizing strife-weary Israelis and Arabs.

In Ukraine, defiant thousands wore orange and blockaded government buildings to protest an election that they – and international observers – said was rigged. The country’s highest court agreed, ordering a new vote and setting off a gleeful celebration.

“We have proven that we are a nation that could defend our choice,” opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko told the hordes in Independence Square. “Justice and freedom are coming back to Ukraine thanks to you, real heroes.”

The American election was not nearly as dramatic. There was no reprise of 2000, no 11th-hour court decision anointing a new president.

But it wasn’t pretty, either. The 2004 election, said political analyst Norman Ornstein, was “the nastiest in our lifetimes. It doesn’t maybe equal the 19th century but it’s hard to watch this without getting an upset stomach if you care about politics.”

There was the Howard Dean zeppelin, inflated by Internet buzz, deflated by disappointing results and the former Vermont governor’s primal caterwaul after the Iowa caucuses. There was the John Kerry juggernaut, wrapping up the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday.

And then the Bush campaign took Kerry apart, painting him as a flip-flopping liberal who wanted to submit American decisions to some kind of global test.

The Republicans got a lot of help from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their commercials questioning Kerry’s heroism during the Vietnam War. The Democrats, meanwhile, were aided by Bush-bashing cadres like MoveOn.org and by Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Even aside from the independent 527 groups, Bush and Kerry raised a record $689 million. They unleashed that bonanza in a torrent of ads and appearances in battleground states, interrupted by three televised debates (it was widely believed that Kerry “won” them, and widely rumored that a suspicious bulge in the president’s jacket was some sort of radio receiver).

In the end, more Americans voted than in any election ever. Bush and Dick Cheney won 286 electoral votes; Kerry and John Edwards won 252. After losing the popular vote by 500,000 in 2000, Bush won by 3.5 million votes this time.

The electoral map was a sea of Republican red, with islands of Democratic blue in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast. The GOP picked up four votes in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate, and knocked off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

Did Americans just not warm to Kerry? Did they better trust Bush to guide their country through the shoals of Iraq and terrorism? Or, as many suggested, was their vote for Bush a reflection of the moral values of a country that this year mourned the passing of its conservative lodestar, Ronald Reagan, at age 93?

Clearly, many oppose gay marriage. Voters in 11 states were asked if they wanted to ban it; in all 11, they said yes.

Their zeal was stoked by a Massachusetts high court decision, giving gay couples the right to marry; clerks there issued more than 4,200 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The mayor of San Francisco married 3,995 same-sex couples, too, before the California Supreme Court ruled the weddings invalid.

“It gave me a feeling like you were kicked in the stomach,” said Margot McShane, who was married – briefly – to Alexandra D’Amario.

It is a feeling shared by Dina Matos McGreevey, who stood by numbly as her husband James, the governor of New Jersey, announced that he was resigning – because he is “a gay American,” and because he had had an affair with a male staffer.

It is a feeling shared by domestic diva Martha Stewart, who went to jail (but not by basketball star Kobe Bryant, who didn’t). It is a feeling shared by the suffering people of Haiti, for whom 2004 was a year of almost unrelenting misery – first, a violent revolution, and then a tropical storm that killed thousands.

And it certainly shared by the people of Florida, buffeted by hurricanes that came and went with the regularity of a crosstown bus, killing 117 Floridians and causing damage in the billions. Ominously, experts predicted intense storm patterns for the next 30 years, or more.

The good news: 2004 is over. The bad news: The 2005 forecast is for more of the same.

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