Election results are in! Obama is President!

As everyone knows by now, Barack Obama is the new President of the United States. It was a surreal victory last night as the announcements were made over television, radio, and internet to a world of anxious people. Whether you lived in the United States and were or were not able to vote in this country, you were glued to the news.

As I boarded my return flight home from Vegas, people were talking on cell phones trying to hear the latest election coverage and by the time we touched down in Burbank, the results were in. Cell phones were powered up the second the wheels hit the runway, and travelers were sharing the information with one another. For the first time in a long while, I saw people communicating with one another during air travel.

As I walked into the terminal, small mobs of people were quietly gathered around terminal monitors listening intently to the first speech Obama would make as the President Elect. Some with tear stung eyes, perhaps in relief that our country could move itself into a new era. Maybe many of them, like myself, felt awestruck that we had finally created change in a system that seemed to be failing us for so many years. The feeling of helplessness and despair oozing out of my body, being replaced with the small familiar fuzziness I remember to be hope.

Hope that the democracy this country was built on actually could serve it's people. Hope that even though many of us are drowning in a downward spiral, that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Hope that people will live less in fear, and more in a community of fellow Americans who can speak to strangers on a plane, hold doors open for one another, and move through their lives with the belief that we can make it better.

Whether your vote was for Obama or McCain, it is difficult not to feel a sense of personal empowerment by his being elected into office. We no longer are depending on a Country to dictate what the next few years will be, we now have the ability to decide, whether we like it or not.