Our moment in time

"This is our moment. This is our time."

The blogosphere is littered with allusions and odes to Tuesday night. I can't offer anything more profound than President-Elect Obama's own words.

In fact, I get choked up just contemplating what happened. I'll be merrily working along, flip over to the "news" page on my browser and see a story that refers to what happened. Without warning, I'll tear up and start sniffling.

"What happened." As if. As if it wasn't anything much. As if the world didn't change, and change in a more profound fashion than it did that June Sunday afternoon in 1969 when a human being walked around on another planet.

Last night, I read Thomas Friedman's NYT column "Finishing Our Work." If you haven't read it, do. It's lovely. I read the first graf out loud to Tia Rae and choked up. Again. Something I just can't seem to stop doing.

In fact, I just called the column up to make sure I got the headline and noted the first graf ... again, again, I teared up.

Thomas is correct. As much as Southern revisionists might disagree, the American Civil War, the Late Great Unpleasantness, as I'm told my paternal great-grandmother called it, finally ended Tuesday evening at 10 p.m. Central Standard Time.

My young nephew, Jerran, won't know a time that a black man wasn't president and it will be as natural to him as satellites, laptop computers and HiDef. My new cousin, Isaac, will look back at this and wonder what all the fuss was about.

And, I can't help but wonder at what my Father might say and think about this. He was, after all, a classic, conservative Republican (albeit more in the Goldwater mold rather than that of Regan) but, in the early 1960s, he helped integrate the public schools in the little Texas Gulf Coast town where we lived. In fact, he had little use for bigots of any stripe.

Part of my wonder at this remarkable period in our history is that Barak Obama didn't run to be our first black president. He seldom talked about it. And, we didn't elect him for that, either ... well, I didn't, nor did any of the people I know. We elected him to be our president, plain and simple and natural as that.

(Okay, maybe, as one of the talking heads said last night, we elected him "savior" but that's more an indication of the last eight years — or 28 years — and our current dire straits than anything he tried to do.)

So. It's done. That chapter is closed and a new one begins.

This is our moment. This is our time. We've been desperate for this for a long, long time. Let's do something with it.