Obama.

I think I feel compelled to blog about election night because it was a first for me.

I voted in both the 2000 & ’04 elections, which turned my formative civic duties into a lesson about the nature of fairness in government. I remember watching the scrabbling, the vote stealing, the chaos of ’00 and wondering what kind of country would let such a shit show suffice for an election. In ’04, we were just crushed. It was like a punch to the gut and a realization that we had to endure four more years of an administration that stood in solid opposition to everything we believed. I cried on the concrete steps up to my shitty apartment and watched my more reckless friends express their feelings through vandalization.

But this time…this time I marked my ballot for a man in whom I so strongly believe. A man who opened his mouth and spoke straight to my unflagging hope, and to the broken hearts of millions of Americans. A man who rose above the clamor, the dirt, the lies, and brought clarity to a vision that had gone out of focus: Yes We Can.

When he speaks, I listen. I don’t expect the man to be a Messiah, but I know greatness when I see it. And that is what I want representing my country, not an emasculated and idiotic Texan gunslinger.

On election night, we all piled into the center of downtown Durham. It was rainy and muddy, so we hid out in The Pinhook for a while, drinking beer out of plastic cups and checking our Blackberries and iPhones for updates. Anna managed to find an Obama volunteer from San Francisco who we chattered with the whole evening, pondering the possibility of North Carolina going blue. And at a certain point, the crowd outside got louder, watching a live feed on a giant inflatable screen.

We moved outside, boots sinking into the municipal mud just in time to see CNN declare that the McCain campaign “didn’t see a path to victory.” By the time they announced Obama the winner, we were arm and arm under the misting rain, dancing, hugging, laughing, cheering…Tears were shed, strangers were hugged, and the country had begun stitching up the wounds, inking tentative treaties with hand shakes.

I watched Obama’s speech wrapped in the arms of one of my best friends, a tear slipping down my cheek when he repeated his famous mantra. It broke the fever of discontent and cynicism incubated in the ranks of my generation for the past eight years. And that night was the first night that we could say, without rancor, without irony, that we were proud to be Americans.