Ineloquent.

Two days ago, we elected the first black president of the United States.
Barack Hussein Obama, president-elect, is the very personification of the American Dream. A dream many thought dead or unrealizable or fabricated. Born to a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, he was raised in a single parent home on food stamps. He spent time abroad, learning in schools that did not separate church from education or the state like we do in this country and he managed to get into the nation's top schools, becoming a Harvard-graduate lawyer. Harvard is how he met his wife and mentor, with whom he has two beautiful daughters. A few years ago, he popped up on the national scene by becoming the very promising junior senator from Illinois. As all good stories must, his story has a downside. On November 3rd, the eve of the most historic election in the history of the United States, his grandmother died after a long battle with cancer. Less than 24 hours before people would flood the polls to decide whether or not her grandson would become this nation's first black president, she finally let go. Perhaps it was her confidence in him or perhaps it was her fear that she would not be able to stand the disappointment of a loss. No matter the reason, it is a tragic footnote to the otherwise perfect American story that belongs to our president-elect.

All of this, however, is not what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to say was that finally, after 8 years of increasingly Orwellian rhetoric, fear, hatred, and ignorance, there is hope. Some people refuse to see it. Their blinders are caused by everything from immaturity to opposing opinions to sheer contrariness. But it is evident in some of the simplest of images. Jesse Jackson crying at Obama's acceptance speech. Jackson, a man who was standing next to Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was shot, probably never thought he would see this in his lifetime. My professor, who happens to have been a prominent student leader in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, equated my generation voting for Obama with his one and only voting experience - when he got to vote for Nelson Mandela in 1994. My parents, one from the tail end of the Baby Boomers and one born the same year as the president-elect, voted with their children (one a college student and one a middle school student) in mind, with the future in mind. Professors, members of various generations and with diverse educational and political experiences, are expressing a hope and a confidence in the political process that's been missing from academia and, indeed, the population as a whole, for quite some time. I, a politically active, college-age American female who was born with a heart defect that required surgery when I was 3-years-old and who would have had quite a hard time achieving what I have in most other countries of the world, love my country for the very first time.

I have been grateful for being an American, I have been proud of being an American, and I have even quite liked being an American. But for the very first time ever, I truly love this country and what it is about to stand for.

I am proud of my friends, my family, my state, and my country for making history. We didn't make history just to say that we did it. We made history by simply standing up for something in which and someone in whom we believed. We made history by bringing our voices together to say, "We have had enough of the fear. We have had enough of the deception. We have had enough of the ignorance and blindness. We have had enough of this war. We have had enough of this destruction of the economy and of our environment. We have had enough of giving up our constitutional rights. We have had enough." This makes me proud because of how vitally important it is that the first time America votes for a black man for president, it's not because he is black but because he stands for what we want in these next 4 years and for what we want to be as a people and as a nation and because he was truly the best man for the job.

Thank you, my fellow Americans, for restoring my hope and my faith in this great country of ours.