Yes, I know that it’s now been nearly two weeks since November 4th, Election Day, or what will likely be turned into National Change Day once Obama becomes president. (Okay, just kidding.) What can I say, there’s so much change going on right now that I feel like I’m drowning in coins!

In all seriousness though, it’s obvious that this was an historic election, and if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that, I’d be rich enough to buy our country’s economy right now. This was the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won with more than 51% of the popular vote, and the first African-American to be elected president. But what I think is even more incredible is that Obama accomplished this with everything imaginable being thrown at him, from the Hillary Clinton campaign targeting him as being inexperienced (this accusation got funny later when Sarah Palin entered the race), to the McCain campaign trying to put up a figurehead “plumber” as being “representative” of Americans, and going strongly against Obama, to both campaigns playing the game of Obama being connected to controversial public figures such as Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers. And yet, you did not see the Obama campaign throwing this kind of mud back at the Clinton or McCain campaigns. In the past, attacks by the Republican smear machine have worked to tilt the election in their favor, but this time, the American public by-and-large ignored these senseless attacks and voted in an election where issues and policy mattered, not character flaws and gaffes.

But why in this election? The fact that our country is in an economic mess and still entangled in an unwinnable occupation in Iraq definitely has a lot to do with Obama’s success, but I think his success in the fact that for once, we finally got a different kind of Democratic campaign and a different kind of Democratic candidate. Most of the Democratic candidates we’ve had have been weasels, without the guts to get anything serious done or to take serious positions on anything. For the most part, our elections have been nothing more than a selection between the lesser of two evils–two rather uninspiring, weak candidates to choose from. Why else have the turnouts from the past few elections been so low, and the margins of victory so small (case in point: the 2000 election)? The major change that we saw in this election was that we saw a Democratic candidate who was strong, who had a strong stance on the issues that matter, who inspired many people, especially young people, to take democracy into their own hands and vote. We had a different kind of candidate and a different kind of campaign, one that promised the kind of change we need. And now, that candidate will be our president-elect in two months.

But for those who look at Obama’s election and proclaim that it marks an end of the legacy of racism and hatred in this country, you are sadly mistaken. If nothing else, this election has gone to shine more light on the bigotry and hatred that is still alive, albeit relatively undercover, in this country. In the aftermath of this election, our country has seen an increase in hate crimes and a massive increase in the purchasing of guns. I heard a report on the radio the other day that KKK membership has gone up–all this in response to the fact that we just elected a president who happens to have slightly darker skin color. And at the same time, national attention has turned in the past two weeks towards my home state of California in response to the unfortunate passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the states. We have not moved away from these 20th century ideas of people who are different than us being inferior to us, we have simply shifted the target from African American people to homosexual people. In what is probably the most ironic thing here, the media is saying that exit polls showed that 79% of African Americans that voted in this election voted in favor of Prop. 8. Probably Keith Olbermann said it best last week:

Like Keith, I don’t have much of a personal relationship with this issue. I know no one in my family who is gay, and I personally don’t have any tendencies towards either side of this issue. The whole idea of there being a “sanctity of marriage” is rather ridiculous in my eyes, because I don’t really sanctify marriage at all whatsoever. But it should be shameful that now, in the twenty-first century, we still choose to deny certain people equal rights simply because they are born with a different genetic trait than we are born with.

At the same time, however, I can’t help but find these anti-Prop 8 protesters somewhat behind schedule. Where were you people BEFORE November 4th? I saw lots of “Yes on Prop 8″ rallies all over my county during the weeks before the election, and only a small handful of individuals rallying against it–and my county overwhelmingly voted against 8. Maybe all of the folks who were against Prop 8 were just too busy before the election to do anything important about it, or maybe they just assumed that Prop 8 would fail for sure. But then, once it passed, they weren’t so damn busy anymore, and now over the past two weekends, we’ve seen huge protests across the state and across the country. Which is all fine and well except that THE THING ALREADY PASSED! WHERE WERE YOU??? So no, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this thing going forward, I just hope that someday in my lifetime, we’ll be at a point where we look back on this with disgrace, the way that we look back on the discriminating events of the 1960s with disgrace today.

This election has brought me a bittersweet victory, and it took a few days for me to feel it sink in. In two months, a group of seniors from my high school and I will travel to Washington, DC to witness history. On the 220th anniversary of when George Washington was first inaugurated, a black man, for the first time, will take his oath of office, and move into the White House, a house built by slaves.

“Oh the times, they are a-changin’…”

Tags: Barack Obama, Countdown, election, gay marriage, history, Keith Olbermann, president, Proposition 8, protests, Video