SI SE PUEDE.

Home sick and feel like I wanna take a Dyson vacuum cleaner to my lungs, but got up early and walked the four blocks to the polling spot, at the public school down the way, “We HEART Michelle” button on the lapel. I’ve voted there about five times now, and it’s always a quickie in-and-out kinda experience… mostly because I feel like that school only covers about a four-block radius of greater BK. This time, though, first time ever, there were lines, and the whole deal took about 30 minutes. I saw my downstairs people, I saw my neighbor from down the block who used to be a dealer off the stoop but gave it up and started college last year, I saw the smiling faces of Boerum Hill and, while waiting in line to pull ye olde red lever for Precinct 63, I started crying, holding my coffee and looking all crappy and swole in the face from various illnesses and/or emotional outbursts. It was awesome not just for the experience of voting for someone I actually believe in, of voting for hopefully the nation’s first African-American president, the promise of a strong leader in the face of the quagmire, the potential relief from the last eight years of hell, the potential cessation of the US military’s illegal occupation of Iraq and redirection of troops to Afghanistan where our dying soldiers truly need help. It was awesome because I felt like I was part of a community of people that make up a neighborhood that make up a borough that make up a metropolitan area that make up a state that make up this country. In short: I FELT PATRIOTIC AS HELL. Maybe for the first time in my life, but definitely for the first time since I went to a Clinton rally in 1992 at an airport hangar in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at age 16, and felt like this dude would do us good, generationally, culturally, everything. I felt included, one in a whole, because that’s what we are.
Now, if McCain wins I’ll know I was wrong–that America doesn’t want me or anyone I know–but I’m gonna savor that and ride on it at least till midnight EST tonight. Please sweet baby Jesus and mysterious Prince Allah, G-d and whatever deity Stephen Hawking worships, Please math god and Zeus and the Israelites’ Golden Calf and the Merrill Lynch bull down on Wall, please let Barack Hussein Obama become the next President of the potentially awesome United States of America.