The Beginning

This is not the end. This is the beginning.

Along with several correspondents of this blog, I too just returned from poll-watching in a battleground. I almost did not go due to family disturbances, but decided it was too important to sit it out. And I can report without one ounce of hyberbole that I have never before made a more correct decision in a life riddled with questionable ones, just as we as a nation have never made a better one after making many, many questionable ones.

Where we were stationed today, many of our faces were not the same. Many of our backgrounds were as dissimilar as people can be in this world. Our paths will likely never intertwine again. But the 1200 or so voters that crossed the threshold of our little piece of this history today and I will share something always. Not only did this country change, but our views of each other did as well. We shared looks and words of encouragement, happiness - and, most of all, understanding. Yesterday, we were strangers. Today, we were something quite different.

For the first time - in history, perhaps - we all were headed in the same direction. We all shared a common goal and a common ground. We were more similar than we were different. And we all had hope that was not lessened by our differences but rather strengthened by it. We shared hugs, high fives, fist bumps and words of appreciation and encouragement. We were a team.

We were one nation. Indivisible. After two hundred and thirty years.

Finally.

I'll never forget this day; this moment. To my dying breath, I will bore my friends, my loved ones and hopefully my children and theirs after that about this day and the people I shared it with. The day when everything changed. I did not watch it on CNN. I, and a band of brothers, lived it and did not just observe history but helped make it happen with our own hands and our own hearts.

I have scarcely had a day I was more proud of in my life personally. I have never had a day I was more proud to be an American. I have never participated in something that gave me a sense of such awe and pride and humility as I did today.

Today, I feel anything is possible. Tomorrow, we all wake up in a new nation. Not one of division and fear and loathing and otherness. One of hope, of faith and of a new freedom, never before possible. Today, we woke up in one America. Tomorrow, we awake in a new one, that we all have helped to create.

One nation.

Indivisible.



Finally.