62,509,207
(i was one)


"how do you feel..."
"i feel like hope won." - oprah

for someone that blogs and waxes incessantly about how great "hope" is, i figure i'd do myself and my girls a disservice if i don't share a few thoughts here about the election last night.

due to his insanely brilliant work for baseball prospectus, i worship nate silver and would trust any of his thoughtful and calculated projections enough to bet my house on them. i wasn't wary of my candidate not winning last night. nate's other passion, politics, led him to start the now famous projection blog, fivethirtyeight. that site, among others, has been projecting obama as the easy winner based on polling data for weeks. now, obviously, people still had to go out and vote (and, wow! did they ever?), but if the polling numbers were even close to accurate, it was obama's night to lose. he didn't.

and do let me say, i think it's awesome. i think obama is intelligent. thoughtful. respectful. he plays basketball well. i want to believe he reads freedarko in all of that spare time of his. he talks of an america that i would like to believe in. he speaks with a genuine sparkle in his eye that seems lost in the world of robotic political candidates. he talks of change. i think he wants what is best for his country and for it's citizens, and i get the feeling he's willing to have a conversation with folks that don't see things his way before he presses forward any sort of "agenda". seems novel.

yeah? but what about the issues? eh, they are what they are. he's a democrat. i'm a democrat. we agree on most things political. whatdoyouwantmetosay?

and, of course, he talks of hope.

according to the results, fivethiryeight was right on when projecting mccain to win my state by over twenty points. i can, at least, lay claim that i was on the winning side of my county, the first time in my electing history that has been the case concerning the president. what does that say about my immediate surroundings and how i play into them? that's for another post, but it is a good step forward. a very good and hopeful step. for me.

if i am lucky enough to grow so old, one day i will talk to hannah and caroline's children about the historic nature of yesterday's election. the next four to eight years we'll have to wait to see if it was a truly transformative one. in the meantime, for the next two and half months, i look forward to all the water-cooler and talk-radio and 24-hour news and sunday school and church-wide discussions on how obama and we can turn hope into momentum into change. how does that happen? where is the handbook? what does that mean for me? do i really have to do something? well, yeah, probably. if not, all of this hope talk just turns into more cliche'.

there are a lot of things in the world that we do not have a handbook at our disposal to help us "fix". that doesn't, necessarily, mean it can't happen. it just means that the rhetoric and politics and good intentions eventually have to give way to honest discourse and action plans.

and that's where things get tricky. messy. painful. and personal. to lay a new and "hopeful" action plan will mean admitting that the one we are currently following is not working. to be honest and constructive will mean that some people's protected feelings may be bruised. if we are fortunate, the bruises will just toughen us up and prepare us to punch back. to take back the idea and ideals that we believe in but for too long we've been willing to sit back and let inertia be our guide.

snowballs heading downhill can be stopped, but not by wishful thinking. not by taking credit for someone's poor decisions and spinning them positive. not by holding grudges. not by huffing and puffing. not by claiming something that's just not there.

hope wins battles. a battle was won last night.

change wins wars. change stops snowballs. change means you have to do something. be pissed. be happy. know why you're either. be something. do something.

um..., is he still talking about obama?

no.