It’s been a week since Barack Obama was elected to be the 44th president of these United States of America. Since the teeth-gnashing disappointment of past elections built a despondent callus, protecting me from potentially misleading polls, Bradley effect, voter disenfranchisement and the same old same old. Since the Get Out The Vote efforts went into overdrive and throngs of anxious voters snaked around city blocks and polling stations. Since the pundits cut from electoral maps and holograms to the rapturous elation of the masses in Chicago’s Grant Park and the revolution was officially televised. It’s been a week since I tearfully celebrated with family and friends then took to the streets to amplify my joy… and yet my euphoria persists.

I continue to cry. I find myself daily grasping for stock footage of how each of the news stations called the election, revisiting triumphant stories and rousing images from across the country and the world, and videos of how neighborhoods erupted with the chorus of spontaneous parades like Harlem’s 125th street and the East Village (yes it is hip to be patriotic). Scrambling for souvenirs I want to encapsulate this emotion. I realize, however, that the gravity of it all will not be culminated in a single night. It will strike me unexpectedly with resurgent waves of pride and inspiration at different times throughout the years to come, on inauguration day, the first state of the union address, the unveiling of change.gov and other innovations of a 21st century president, press conferences (with complete and intelligible sentences), the G8 Summit, etc., etc.

It’s an uncommon excitement for me (I think it’s called patriotism), one I wasn’t fully prepared to experience. Both broadly empathetic and deeply personal, gushing and firmly cerebral, historic and prospective. This election was an overt rejection of our darker days and basest compulsions and a fervent enlistment of our collective talents and hopes. This is a brand new America, inclusive and bold and I’ve never stood taller as an American.

L.Arnell

I am so overwhelmed!!!

L.Arnell