My wife can get emotional. Today she expressed her feelings to me about Barack's win last night. What she said seemed profound to me, and I asked her to write her feelings down and let me post them on DKos. Here goes (below the fold).
A Great Day
For the last several months, conversations between my husband and me have begun thus: “It’s a great day to be a democrat!” says my husband. “Why?!” I always say. “Tell me.” And my husband would regale me with the latest Obama triumph, or republican gaffe. Underneath, I am living in a panic at the thought of another 4 years of the dark ages. When things aren’t going well, I call my husband and say, “I’m learning the Canadian National Anthem. If Barack doesn’t win, we’re moving. I’m not kidding.” I wasn’t kidding.
Then last night, as terror and panic began to subside, replaced with hope and promise, tears kept springing into my eyes. I could barely breathe. Tears are welling as I write this. In my lifetime, I have experienced several pivotal events that have brought our country together, when we all felt the same overwhelming emotions, and it made us feel close to our friends, our neighbors and our fellow countrymen. And each of these events has been a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion: John Kennedy’s assassination, where the teachers in my school sent us home and we saw our parents huddled in front of the radio or TV, crying and full of grief. We hadn’t seen our parents crying before -- that generation just got on with it. But this shattered hopes beyond any experienced by them before. Then, like one blow after another, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We were dropped to our knees with grief and sorrow, so when Watergate came along, most of us just took it as a confirmation of our own now cynical outlook, our lack of any promising expectation. The bombing of the towers in NY on 911 was another tragedy that had the potential to bring us together, albeit once again in grief. We wanted to come together and for a little while I suppose we did, until our fears and unity were squandered to feed greed, baseness, and insecurity.
And now this. This, the first event in my life to bring our country together in joy. I got several emails from friends in Europe, each saying that there wasn’t a dry eye over there, either. I think it is what my parents felt at the end of WWII – exuberance, elation, gratitude and a deep connection to each other. This time, though, it’s not just to each other as Americans but to the welcome we feel at the rest of the world’s happiness for us. We belong to the world again. It’s a great day to be an American.
UPDATE: I just received an email from our local phonebank coordinator, thanking everyone for their hard work on the campaign. He then wrote, "On a side note, I must confess that I am disappointed that I could not share in the celebrations on election night with all of you. You see, I left early on election day for Europe.
Right now I am in Prague, Czech Republic...it is almost 11:15pm on Wednesday, November 5th, and everyone over here (including in Zurich, Switzerland, which I stopped over prior) is happy that Obama has won, restoring--at least in part--some of our dignity in the eyes of the international community. I am sure the sentiment will be echoed in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy, which I will be travelling to over the next few weeks.
Again, thank you all for doing your part. We are all, now, a part of history...one that we have helped to create."