Today I feel the way I felt when people walked on the moon: an incredibly positive step forward in human history has occurred. Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States!
The speech he gave in Chicago's Grant Park was eloquent, moving, and inspirational. The camera panned in on Jesse Jackson, who was crying. (And Rev. Jackson has been known to give a few great speeches himself!)
Michigan went for Obama and made a couple of other surprisingly progressive steps, too: we passed propositions allowing for medical use of marijuana and for embryonic stem cell research. A few other states took steps backward, outlawing adoption or foster parenting by gay/lesbian couples, for example. Watching Florida go to Obama was thrilling, a moral victory that helps to erase the stench of what happened eight years ago. Best of all, we are now on the last weeks of the Bush administration, something I've yearned for. January 20, 2009, will see the start of a political system that will not be as full of stupidity, backwardness, unneeded secrecy, and underhandedness as this one has been. As a teacher, I'm pretty good at reading people, and my "take" on Obama is that he truly is what he seems, a moral man who isn't preachy, a good man who genuinely cares for others, an honest man who will not willingly tolerate deception. It is the dawn of a new day. A new broom sweeps cleanest. Yeah, cliches. I'm not as eloquent as our President-Elect. I'm just one proud American this morning. I'm thrilled to be able to witness such an exciting moment in history.
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