Thank you, America

Yes, I realize that the last vote has not yet been counted. But, hey, I'm in Stats this semester, so I have diplomatic immunity, okay? ;-)

But seriously. This moment is the American exceptionalism I was taught to love--and have found nothing in the thirty-odd years since to make me fall out of love. This is most emphatically not the "We have the monopoly on the right answers and the bright ideas" perversion that was made of this exceptionalism--even before we as a nation went into denial about having the stone age bomb us right back in Vietnam.

No, I'm talking about unbridled promise and the responsibility to embrace it with passion and brains and discipline. You know, the whole "Free to be You and Me" thing: "Every boy in this land/grows to be his own man. In this land every girl/grows to be her own woman." And if that woman or that man turns out to be the President of the United States of America...well, that's just the whole freakin' point, now ain't it?

That being said, I realize that these are baby steps. President-elect Barack Hussein Obama is not a knight in shining armor by any stretch. And it is a dangerous thing to hold people's dreams as well as shield them from their fears--far, far more weighty than Prince Hal's laments about the uneasy fit of the crown.

But as Archimedes said so long ago, "Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." Today and tonight, the fulcrum has been moved in the direction where it can do more good for the most people of this earth. If I can wake to the news that Californians transcended yet another form of bigotry at the polls, it will be an even better world than I could have hoped for four years ago.

And so, again: Thank you, America. No matter how you voted. As a History graduate, it is humbling to see history unfold in its myriad dimensions.