WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

After staying up until 5 am to see Obama's victory safely sealed, I slept through class until noon. When I woke up, the first thing I did was watch his victory speech, which made me cry. How incredible! Looking at all of the pictures from the rally made me wish I had been back in Chicago for the election, but I also noticed something else. All of the young people in the pictures were smiling and shouting, but the older people were crying. For them, this has been a long saga from the Civil Rights Movement to what many people are already calling a "post-racial America" and Obama's election is the culmination of a long, hard-fought battle for equality. At the same time, I was disappointed to see that my home state passed the ban on gay marriage. I couldn't believe that so many people had voted for something so clearly discriminatory at the same time that they marked their ballots for the first black president of the United States. It made me realize that, just as racial prejudice was the storyline of our parents' generation, homosexuality will likely have its own version of the Civil Rights Movement during our generation's lifetime. Think about it: almost all of us know people who are gay and have little problem with their sexual orientation, and many of us are for gay rights such as the right to marriage even though it doesn't affect us personally; meanwhile, people among the generations of our parents and grandparents are often the ones holding most tightly to anti-gay prejudices, just as their parents and grandparents clung to racism and fought the inevitable progress of civil rights for African Americans. Just some food for thought, I guess, on such an historic day.

In the meantime, I'm excited to see what the response will be in Spain. I already know what my uber-conservative (and pretty racist) senora is going to say. But I'd like to see what normal people are thinking and how this election might already be changing some opinions of America over here in Europe.