Justin | 
11 5th, 2008| 
This is our nation’s proudest moment. The day when once and for all we prove that anyone can achieve the highest office in arguably the entire world. Not just a black man, but a mulatto, the product of miscegenation, the worst possible insult to bigots everywhere, and he was overwhelmingly voted into office by a populace still dominated by European descent. When he was born, he wouldn’t have been able to drink at the same fountain as a white and now he will represent our social progress to the rest of the planet. By god, it took two hundred and thirty-two years, but we have finally lived up to the words our forefathers wrote when they founded this grand experiment in democracy. The souls of these complicated men who promised freedom to all despite a number of them being themselves slave owners can rest a little easier now knowing that they provided us the pathway to greatness.
There are some of you out there who feel that this could be topped by having a woman elected… and that would be a fair argument to make. But it should be considered that in the minds of the majority voting populace, this should have been the harder choice. Now it’s only a matter of time before we see our first woman president. My best guess would be… say… eight years from now.
That said, allow me to step down from the lofty heights of elation and come back to earth to tell you about my voting day in my usual “plain-speak” manner.
Here is a gesture sketch I did while waiting in line to vote… You can see where I started the piece because of how quickly it degenerated into rushed stickmen (and women) because the line started moving at a thankfully brisk pace.
I arose at six a.m. to get to the polling station (held at my old elementary school, R.E. Tobler) by seven. I was expecting a massive line given the massive lines I had seen all last week when I was trying to vote early, but there were only about fifteen people ahead of me when they opened the doors. My mother told me later that fifty percent of eligible voters in Nevada had already voted, thus making things even easier come election day. If that’s true, thanks guys. You should have said something so that I could sleep in… Buncha bastards. So I managed to pop off my votes and head home in a total of forty-five minutes. I stopped by the neighbors’ house to see what they were up to and Bernice was running a volunteer station for Obama… And was very pregnant. I was a bit ashamed by the fact that I hadn’t stopped by in so long that my next door neighbor and her husband had managed to gestate a child for so long before I noticed. Fortunately, her and the other volunteers were very busy and I needed to go and get a room ready for painting before heading into work, so I half excused myself, was half excused by Bernice and went to go tape down a tarp. After completing that task and getting in a quick nap, I chongled on into work where I managed to get very little done over the course of the day, which is fine given there was little to do. I got home in time to see that Obama already had a massive lead and head back out to buy my grandmother and myself dinner just as FOX and CNN were announcing the whole thing was over. I dismissed it at first because not enough votes had been tallied, but when I got back twenty minutes later, it was official. I missed McCain’s speech, but I heard that it was a good one. I sat with my mother and openly teared up as Barack Hussein Obama gave his acceptance speech. I looked at her after he talked about the elderly woman who cast a vote and stated that her mother, eighty-seven and a life-long, tow-the-party-line Republican, had voted for a Democrat. We are never stuck in our ways. Thank you for showing me that gran’ma. Afterward, I realized that I had a bottle of decent champagne that was sitting around without a designated purpose. The universe provides. We were going to head next door and celebrate with our hard-working neighbors, but their lights were all out, likely at a party elsewhere, so we just poured a couple of glasses and toasted America, land of opportunity.
