Hell, Yeah!

Photos from Huffington Post

A little while ago, I wrote about the phenomenon of thought ideas and circumstances converging to bring a lesson home. You might be thinking of something, and, suddenly your thoughts are played out in the action of others on the street. The contents of some random dream you have appear in an editorial column. A conversation you overhear plays out in a sit-com that evening. Life is always like that, no?

So tonight, I am in my class, Revolutionary and Federalist America, watching a film (yes, the professor took pity on us) about the creation of the Constitution. All those forefathers long ago turned to dust. I wondered what they would think about the America of today. Would they think we had realized their ambitious and messy dream? Would they marvel at how far we had progressed (or strayed, depending on your point of view)? Would they see this Presidential Election as the natural outcome of their grand experiment? Or would they shake their heads at the circus (truth to be told, not the first circus in this world)?

I could not WAIT to get to my car, and hear the early returns.

Just as I turned on the radio, NPR called Pennsylvania for Barack Obama. I nearly burst into years. See, just two days ago, I received video of a crowd of people who live just a few miles away from me. After a;; these years, they were still willing to call him an A-rab, a terrorist, a socialist, a ... There was one kid (he could not have been thirty!) who said he could never accept a black man as President. These were people who told this to a stranger with a video camera. What must they say in the privacy of their basements? I was ashamed of these fellow Pennsylvanians. Can we really have made so little progress after all?

But: "Pennsylvania has been called for Obama."

Followed by a whole bunch of other states.

George? James? Ben? Patrick? Alexander?

Can I get a, "Hell, yeah!"?

Just now: "NBC has just projected Barack Obama as the next President of the United States".

Hell, yeah.