When the realization of it comes to me, I feel an internal shudder, like when you realize that something that you never thought possible is not only possible, but reality.

This picture did it to me again:

I’ll tell him the story of how his parents took him to the polls on Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn, and all around them were the faces of America: elderly Jewish holdouts from an earlier era of Flatbush, recent immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh, African Americans, West Indians, and, of course, white folks like me and Nicole who were attracted by the low apartment prices and easy community of our neighborhood.

We’ll tell him that we voted for a candidate who believed in the same progressive politics we believed in, and that his running mate held them too. We’ll tell him that the night before, the presidential candidate had spoken to crowds of up to 90,000 people in states like Virginia. I’ll then explain that Virginia had once been a Republican stronghold.

I’ll explain how I used Twitter and my iPhone not to play games, but to send a brief message describing the situation at the polling station, a message about the wait time and whether I’d run into any trouble. I’ll explain that across the country, people had banded together to reclaim the power of their democracy using tools like this, and in doing so had rediscovered the strength of communities, the true foundations of citizenship.

I’ll remind him that we were emerging from one of the darkest periods in our country’s history, a period in which our nation had been attacked by terrorists, an act that, rather than uniting us, inspired our leaders to lie to us, to offer false comfort, and to enact grave misdeeds that endangered not only our own physical safety, but the future of our democracy.

I’ll remind him that no individual could possibly dig us out of this mess alone, that it was up to all of us to rebuild our country, like a city rebuilds after a storm. But if any one person could act as a figurehead, as a symbol of who we were in 2008 and what we could be in the future, it was Barack Obama.

And then, I’ll point out that this man — a man with a Muslim, foreign-sounding name, a man with brown skin, a man who ate arugula — was the man who inspired white, black, hispanic, Asian, rich, middle-class, and poor Americans alike. Most of us voted for him not because of his skin color or his background, but because of his policies and ideals, and because we could truly see him as a transformative leader. That, I’ll explain, was change.

Was it the unique combination of his own traits that made us believe? Maybe. But it was also, I’ll tell him, the resounding sense that enough was enough. It was time to move on and rebuild. And this was the man for the job.

Hopefully Arlo will understand the importance of this day. But in all likelihood, he’ll grow up thinking this election was normal, that it’s normal to have a black president named Barack Hussein Obama who talks about things like universal health care and middle-class job growth and building international respect. What a sweet normalcy that would be.

So many activists and journalists are overloading on the election right now (the Politico’s Ben Smith says the election is “so metabolic at this point I’m not sure I can really unplug”) that we don’t know how we’ll cope after Tuesday, when the constant adrenaline rush of polls and politics comes to an abrupt end.

Indeed, some people are anxiously anticipating a come-down as hardcore as that from a strong narcotic. After months — more than 21 of them! — of being bystanders, we’ll get a shot at participating. But after that, we’re gonna have to find something else to fill up the activist void, lest it be filled with candy and videogames.

It’s an anxious thought, that all of this energy and enthusiasm that’s been building up for that last two years will quickly blow its top like an electoral geyser, and then — poof! — we’ll sit around lonely and dejected until the next tsunami of political stimulus smacks us in the face.

But in addition to filling the country with a new sense of hope and optimism in some seriously dark times, the Obama campaign injected new terminology into the vernacular of young America: the notion of something called “organizing.” Before this election, how often had you heard college-age students talking about “organizing” as if it were a new emo band or a video game?

Regardless of who they actually voted for, a new generation has seen, through the Obama campaign, what happens when you unite a huge amount of people around a single cause. Even those that didn’t support it saw the campaign as the embodiment of community organizing, and it created a movement much bigger than the administration of a tiny Alaskan town (sorry, Sarah Palin). Those of us that were born after the civil rights era had never seen anything like it.

Catch the whole thing here.

McCain’s campaign has engaged in sleaze and slander on a scale that’s surprising everyone who knows him, and his choice for VP has not raised questions about his ability to lead, but could also mean that someone who had never left the U.S. — never even had the desire! — until visiting troops in Kuwait, someone who supports the banning of books and the eradication of choice, who denies our role in global warming, who thinks that creationism ought be taught in public schools, who doesn’t believe in sex education or the use of stem cells for research, and who has been on the national scene for approximately two weeks, might be president in the near future.  It’s terrifying.

We need to do all we can to elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden, two candidates who exemplify all that John McCain Sarah Palin are not.  But here’s the wrinkle: I’m having a child in October.  I can’t leave my family to volunteer in a swing state, and I can’t take a leave from my job to help out with the campaign.

So given that I’ll be at home with a young child — whose future could be so bright if Obama is elected — how can I channel all of my excess energy in ensuring that my kid grows up governed by an Obama Administration?

Also, I’ve been looking for a way to make a pun on the word “palindrome.” Ideas?

Jill smartly sums up growing opinion about what if this were Obama’s daughter who’d gotten pregnant. She brings up an excellent, if upsetting, point about race-based double standards (emphasis mine):

Wow. Could not have said it better myself. There remains a stereotype
that African-Americans have poor morals. If Barack Obama’s
daughter were pregnant, you’d better believe that pundits would
be tsk-tsking the dysfunctional “black family” and there
would be plenty of b-roll of black pregnant teens in our public schools
with talk about the single black welfare queens & the national
burden they create. That’s the double standard — Palin is
permitted to individualize where Obama is not.

The white Palin is perceived as everymom and her own person at once; a black Palin would be tasked with answering for her entire race.

UPDATE: This bit from Daily Show shows the crazy and hysterical hypocrisy coming from Karl, Bill, Dick, and co.