We Did It
It happened. Barack Obama is our President-Elect. He won so clearly and decisively that nobody can doubt it. I can go to sleep tonight without wondering what will happen to those I love if McCain were to drop dead in a year and leave Sarah Palin as our President. I am more moved and humbled than I can ever remember being about an election.
I am grateful. That is the biggest and clearest thing I can name. This profound, overwhelming, welling-over of gratitude to those who voted, volunteered, gave money, talked to their friends and family and strangers about the things that mattered to them and their dreams and hopes and fears. I am so full I can even be grateful to McCain and those who supported him, and I didn't know if I could ever feel that. The system is far, far from perfect. I know we will be hearing stories for a long time yet about voter disenfranchisement, about how things might go askew with such a democratic lock on the house, senate, and executive branch, and, still, how Obama is really a Muslim Socialist Terrorist who is out to sell us down the river and into the hands of Bin Laden. But basically, today, the system worked.
Colorado voted in Udall and Markey, out Shaeffer and Musgrave, and against the fetal rights bill. Massachusetts has, as we kept cheerfully crowing over at Somethin' Somethin', a whole bunch of tax-paying, pot-smoking, non-racing greyhounds. It looks like South Dakota is not going to pass its abortion ban. Florida did ban gay marriage. Things are looking very dicey for Prop. 8 in California. I am worried about Prop. 8, but still, overall, feeling that gratitude.
My entire adult life has been overshadowed by the Shrub, to remember fondly for a moment here the late great Molly Ivins. The 2000 election took place just a few days before my 18th birthday, leaving me ineligible to vote in it and left, like all of us, to deal with the consequences of an administration whose work I have never, not for one moment, been able to support. Now, maybe, that begins to change.
I have always said that I am not "proud to be an American." Being born here was luck, not something I did anything to earn, and thus I cannot really take pride in it. What I can do is keep working to make the country a place that truly takes care of its people. I can work to leave it better than I found it. For the first time since I reached my legal majority, that no longer feels like an impossibly uphill battle.
I am grateful. That is the biggest and clearest thing I can name. This profound, overwhelming, welling-over of gratitude to those who voted, volunteered, gave money, talked to their friends and family and strangers about the things that mattered to them and their dreams and hopes and fears. I am so full I can even be grateful to McCain and those who supported him, and I didn't know if I could ever feel that. The system is far, far from perfect. I know we will be hearing stories for a long time yet about voter disenfranchisement, about how things might go askew with such a democratic lock on the house, senate, and executive branch, and, still, how Obama is really a Muslim Socialist Terrorist who is out to sell us down the river and into the hands of Bin Laden. But basically, today, the system worked.
Colorado voted in Udall and Markey, out Shaeffer and Musgrave, and against the fetal rights bill. Massachusetts has, as we kept cheerfully crowing over at Somethin' Somethin', a whole bunch of tax-paying, pot-smoking, non-racing greyhounds. It looks like South Dakota is not going to pass its abortion ban. Florida did ban gay marriage. Things are looking very dicey for Prop. 8 in California. I am worried about Prop. 8, but still, overall, feeling that gratitude.
My entire adult life has been overshadowed by the Shrub, to remember fondly for a moment here the late great Molly Ivins. The 2000 election took place just a few days before my 18th birthday, leaving me ineligible to vote in it and left, like all of us, to deal with the consequences of an administration whose work I have never, not for one moment, been able to support. Now, maybe, that begins to change.
I have always said that I am not "proud to be an American." Being born here was luck, not something I did anything to earn, and thus I cannot really take pride in it. What I can do is keep working to make the country a place that truly takes care of its people. I can work to leave it better than I found it. For the first time since I reached my legal majority, that no longer feels like an impossibly uphill battle.