Tuesday night after Maja's birthday dinner Kathleen and I were walking to Union Square to take the subway home. We had plans to go home and probably watch the Stephen Colbert/Jon Stewart election coverage or something along those lines. I figured it would take forever for the results to come in and that I'd probably wake up at 5am to check the Internet and find out that way. But about a block from Union Square we started hearing screams - at first I thought it was just kids at a bar.....but then it was like the whole city was screaming, it was coming from all the huge apartment buildings and delivery men and taxis started honking their horns. Kathleen and I sort of just stared at each other and wondered out loud if the Virgin Mega store or somewhere with a TV was open so we could figure out what was going on. Lucky for us, four NYU girls wearing pajama pants ran by and yelled at us that Obama had won. Of course we screamed and hugged and then blindly sort of followed the pajama pant gals over to Union Square. Within minutes it went from about 30 people to hundreds then thousands of people. As far as you could see people were coming to celebrate. A group of kids from Brooklyn had sewn the most massive American flag I've ever seen and we all hoisted it above our heads. The chanting and screaming went on and on and the flag covered the street lamps in the square to make this tented party effect. We were getting texts that McCain was giving his concession speech I called my parents who were so dead asleep that they hung up on me (and then turned on the TV so they could watch the speeches). It was a rare moment to see New York so happy and patriotic and to feel part of it. Like Michele Obama, it's been a long time since I've felt proud of my country and that night it felt like there was some sort of hope not just for the future but for right now, that people are believing in a different kind of America then they've been sold for, well as long as I could vote.
So now that I've been all mushy, what the hell on Prop 8. Lets hope we get some more equality in the upcoming years.
Here's a grainy video I took with my cellphone right after Obama was announced as the winner...
And here is a video I found on youtube of what it looked like 20 minutes later. Everyone under the flag
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