I spent election night on the floor of my apartment with a cluster of friends getting high off CNN. When Obama talked about the supposedly apathetic young voters that had mobilized behind him, I looked around at us. I don't know if we count as young voters anymore. The tattooed, snarky crowd around me averaged about 35. But we are sure as shit not apathetic. These are some involved, informed, smart-as-hell friends I've got. (Why they let me hang around is another question entirely.)

You want to talk about some obscure Japanese pop band, yeah, they can do that, but right now we're discussing local redistricting, thankyouverymuch. And you know what? One of us won. One of us freaking won. Okay, so probably Obama doesn't have an opinion on the best piercer in town, but he was still our guy.

And it felt, at least a little bit, like it was people like us who put him there. We'd gotten damn sick and tired of our government not reflecting our reality, of it not speaking to or for us. McCain and all the guys who look like him and came before him are not us. They are not one of us. They don't know us. They don't want to know us.

We live in dense urban centers. They talk about a cultural mixing pot and then go live behind gates in planned communities. They're working out the tax structure on million-dollar bonuses, and we're trying to figure out why the guy sleeping on the sidewalk next to our car can't get a shelter bed for the night. They're starting wars over oil to power cars we're trying to get to run on hydrogen in the first place.

When Obama took that stage on election night, a clear win, a decisive electoral college win, and started to speak, yowser. It was historical and personal, and we are now all holding our breath and praying to whatever God we believe in that he just doesn't fuck it up.


P.S.

From the L.A. Times today on strained relations between McCain and Palin i.e. "How the entire country just dodged a bullet":

"Fox News reported Wednesday that Palin's lack of knowledge on some topics also strained relations. Carl Cameron reported that campaign sources told him Palin had resisted coaching before her faltering Katie Couric interviews; did not understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country; and could not name the three nations that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the United States, Canada and Mexico."