America!

I have always had a deep love for the story that is American history.

I anticipated that this could happen, hoped and prayed that it would, and yet when I heard the projection on NPR while driving home from school tonight, I couldn't help but feel a huge wave of emotion come over me. Relief, disbelief, pride, humility, joy, and anxiety. Tears streaming down my face, I drove through the streets of downtown LA marveling at the stories and journeys that have made our country what it is and the President that will represent them beginning in 2009.

For the last 8 years, I have not felt pride for the only country I have ever called home. I haven't felt that our government was functioning wisely or honestly. Every trip I've taken abroad, I've had conversations about the incredulity that others have felt toward our policies. A distancing from politics in my own life occurred, a cynicism developed, an excuse formed in my mind that it doesn't matter much anyway. A long journey from the younger version of me that once considered a career in government service, spent a summer registering new citizens to vote, and organizing election monitoring.

And now I feel as though I've reawakened. An amazing thing has happened in our country today that proves that America is never static. We can judge a candidate fairly, we can think for ourselves about what is best for our nation, and we are still the land of the free and the home of the brave. Free because we spoke today for a candidate that we believe represents our story, and brave because we stood up for him despite the opposition's attempt to otherize and distort him.

Barack Obama is a brilliant, eloquent, amazingly gifted man, but he is not our savior. He will not make all our problems go away. But he has fought to achieve an extraordinary moment in extraordinary times, and the pride I feel to be a part of this moment has overwhelmed me in a way that I did not expect. That my own father, a 1st generation Taiwanese immigrant, saw in this African-American candidate a man worth casting his vote for after years of telling me that votes cast in California don't matter, so much so that he would bring his ballot with him on a business trip to China and mail it from distant shores so that his vote would be counted- that tells me that something amazing has occurred. We are still a country that is righting the wrongs of our past and making the world stop and wonder at the endless possibilities that could occur on our shores.

God, bless America.