Show Me What Democracy Looks Like

Today the presidential campaigns come to a close, the polls are open, and the curtains close behind voters as they decide who will take the reigns for the next four years. As I sit back, nervous, jittery, mentally pacing around, impatiently waiting for results to come in from Virginia and North Carolina, I have time to reflect on this election cycle.
While there's been no shortage of politics as usual, mudslinging from both sides, policy fabrications, and straight up lies (mostly from the GOP), something is different this time. Thanks in large part to Obama campaign manager David Axelrod's grassroots strategy, the political current has energized the US citizenry in historic fashion. Young people from New Hampshire to Hawaii have been reborn as active citizens of a nation where apathy was supposed to be the defining character of our generation. Those people whose belief in the political process was squashed over the last eight years (or 30 years for that matter) have once again found hope (I swear that word just came out, it wasn't intentional). In Obama, we have been given something to believe in. But it is more than the man, more than the candidate--man will forever be imperfect, fallible. Obama has come to epitomize an entire movement.
A movement founded on the idea that people can come together to change the way the world works. Over the last eight years I've participated in so many attempts to change things both minute and grand. And rarely have I felt as connected to some greater good as I do now, as I did when I pulled the lever this morning (Working Families for Obama '08!). We have always been fighting against the powers that be. Fuck Bush, fuck Cheney, fuck politics. They owned it. Since the end of the primaries, we have had the chance to fight for power so that we can fight alongside a power we respect.
Should Obama win this election, all those thousands of volunteers and newly invigorated citizens cannot stop working. Quite the contrary. This is hardly the end of the road. It is just the beginning.

More on that tomorrow...For now, go VOTE!