Obama's election blew my mind. Since it happened I've been struggling with a wave of emotion. Not of jubilation, but of gratitude--gratitude to all the American voters who voted for change. Tuesday night, I designed "Thank You America" T-shirts (available here if you're interested) so that my friends and I could walk around with that gratitude on our chests. But the T-shirts, cool as they are, simply do not express the full scope of what I want to get across. Today, as I studied the Daily Kos election scoreboard yet again, boggled by the fact that America had elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as president, I was inspired again to express my gratitude more completely. So here it is:
Thank you America! Thank you not-so-red America. Thank you ultra-blue America.
Thank you hockey Moms, soccer Moms, working Moms and I'm-not-ready-to-be-a-Moms for voting for common sense freedoms. Thank you everyone who voted against perpetual war, and everyone who voted against the party that couldn't handle Katrina.
(more over the hump)
Thank you America! Thank you not-so-red America. Thank you ultra blue America.
Thank you hockey Moms, soccer Moms, working Moms and I'm-not-ready-to-be-a-Moms for voting for common sense freedoms. Thank you everyone who voted against perpetual war, and everyone who voted against the party that couldn't handle Katrina. Thank you blue collar workers and thank you tech workers. Thank you nurses and thank you machinists. Thank you parents and teachers for voting for more funding for our children's education. Thank you lawyers who couldn't stand the erosion of the U.S. Constitution.
Thank you everyone who voted your financial or security concerns over your anti-abortion preferences. Thank you Southern Baptist African Americans and Catholic Latinos for voting en masse for the most progressive candidate in a generation.
Thank you New Mexico for producing a definitive vote. Thank you Ohio for getting your voting machines working and allocating enough machines to enable everyone who wanted to vote to do so. Thank you Florida retirees and Cuban immigrants for understanding that the Republican lines against taxes and the Castro brothers are nothing more than a lot of hot air. Thank you Colorado and Indiana and North Carolina for squeaking through with the improbable and proving it isn't the impossible. Thank you also, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois for giving us a blue mid-West.
Thank you everyone who was shocked by the nomination of an unprepared small-town mayor as candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. Thank you all you decent Americans who were horrified by the anti-Muslim, anti-black coded language employed by the La Brea Tar Pit rhetoric of the Republican campaign.
Thank you Andrew Sullivan and like-minded bloggers for your obsessive but principled pursuit of Palin's medical and email records and for your detailed coverage of her idiocratic policy proposals and (un)consitutional interpretations. Thank you Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey and Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and so many other comics for skewering the political blowfish of the right. Thank you Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow for rediscovering the potential for educated, informed yet energetic discussion of the world we live in. And thank you David Letterman for letting John McCain have it when he deserved it most.
Thank you Markos Moulitsas Zuniga for what you created and enabled with the Daily Kos. Thank you every sweet goddamned gorgeous anonymous pajama-clad blogger who frequents, contributes to, learns from, and riffs off of the great orange Satan. Thank you all you varied and obstreperous bloggistas for digging in and attacking McCain's various stupidities with so much principle and so much energy. Thank you to those main-stream pundits and journalists who rediscovered your calling. Thank you every single old fogey who can't get past my generation's casual use of bad language, but can agree that things have gotten out of hand and have to change.
Thank you to the Obama campaign for running a 50-state chess game and for utilizing the internet as it was screaming out to be used; thank you too for running an inspirational campaign rather than any of a dozen possible rat-eat-dog political implosions. Thank you to Howard Dean and his campaign for pioneering so much of what the Obama campaign brought to fruition. Thank you to all the small-dollar donors who funded the Obama media wave, and thank you to the tech geniuses who made all of the political web's logical apparatus sing the methodical song of functional democracy.
Thank you Virginia for turning the unlikely into the undeniable. Thank you under-thirty-somethings for getting out and voting in (near) record numbers. Thank you to my newly-retired Mom for your tireless work in West Virginia. Thank you every state with mail-in, early, and absentee voting for making this one of the most amazing two weeks in recent history.
Thank you every white American who didn't run screaming from the prospect of a Black president. Thank you every Jane Doe and Joe Smith and Mary Green and John WASP who was not horrified by the prospect of a president Barack Hussein Obama. Thank you small towns for not buying into the "real America" shtick peddled by the McCain-Palin campaign. Thank you everyone who recognized that a 9-plus trillion dollar debt load is not sustainable, or that Jimmy Carter can not rationally be blamed for a housing bubble that both developed and collapsed during the Bush presidency. Thank you political activists and community organizers for talking to complete strangers about what you believe in and care most about.
Thank you college graduates struggling under crushing student debt for not voting for the tax policy that would benefit you the most...if you were ever to get out from under your debt and earn a couple of million dollars a year like Joe the Plumber will in another life. Thank you to everyone who didn't vote to drill, baby drill, or bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Thank you to everyone who voted not to impoverish our children and grandchildren any further than they have already been impoverished. Thank you to all you magnificent, patriotic Americans who voted to begin our slow painful disconnection from the middle-Eastern oil teat.
Thank you Hollywierd liberals and Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, Birkenstock wearing Vermonters. Thank you stereotypical real Americans, and thank you stereotypical fake Americans. Both your real votes and your wholly imaginary fake votes contributed to one of the most astounding, courageous, historic, and important watershed moments in American history.
Thank you America. Thank you all of you myriad crazies. Thank you all you boring everymen. Thank you 9-to-5ers, and thank you up-at-nooners. Thank you every last one of you dreamers. Thank you to all the wishers, all the hopers, and all the would-be Shel Silversteins and wanna-be Beatles. Thank you to the cat people and the dog people and the hamster people and even the stinky manic ferret people. Thank you to the fishermen and the hunters. Thank you to the hikers and climbers and conservationists and treehuggers.
We couldn't have done it without you
Thank you for doing the right thing.
Thank you.
Just. Thank you.
[Update]
Elise is taking a more personal approach to the whole thank you thing in the top comments diary right now. Great minds think alike and love is in the air, and all that. So here's my question: who would you most like to thank for this momentous vote?