Pictures: “Remember the Troops” and Moving Election ’08 Artwork displays

Tuesday night will no doubt be a defining moment in the lives of people across the country, across the world. For WU students, it will probably become a “flashbulb” memory – a time you remember forever, every little detail burned into your brain and memory because of the personal significance of the event. If you close your eyes, you can remember everything: where you were, everyone and everything around you, the sights, the smells, the sounds, the emotions.

There were results watching parties all over campus – in bedrooms, common rooms, classrooms, and several in the DUC alone. When CNN projected that Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of our country – campus burst into shouts, phone calls, photographs, and tears of joy, shock, and disbelief. On the South 40, students drove cars in circles around the swamp, honking their horns. On the parking garage outside of Nemerov, students blasted music from their cars and had a dance party (that was subsequently broken up by WUPD). In the DUC, tears flowed down faces like electoral votes for our new president.

Obama’s election means so many things to so many people – a new page in the history of our racially tense country; the breaking of the glass (some might say cement) ceiling for African Americans; a new breath of excitement and investment in the political process in America; the payoff for such hard work by so many people – WU students included! The years of reading news articles, the months of heated debates among friends, the weeks of campaigning to have a stake in such a momentous moment in history, the hours in line to vote, the seconds – that felt like years – waiting for the results to come in.

Yes, we can. Yes, we will. Yes, we did.

And for the more conservative among us – the saddening defeat, the sickening feeling of dealing with joyous liberals/Obama supporters, the concession that the President is OUR President and that life is too comfortable to move to another country anyway.

WU is a very liberal college campus – like most – but a quick login to Facebook will remind many students that not everyone is as liberal or as pro-Obama as the majority of the WU populace. This writer is actually embarrassed – for the first time, might I add – to be from Texas [which voted 55/45 for McCain – that’s pretty close if you ask me]. Obama is not “an idiot” – anyone who can be in the Senate, run for President, and win is not stupid. “President? Yes. Messiah? NO.” --Did anyone say that he was? “I hope he can deliver on his promises, and give them what they want.” --Don’t we all?

The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office in the nation – in the world – is simultaneously the last page in the current chapter of our history and the first page in the next one. We’re all nervous to see what comes next. But you might as well be excited too. It’s not like you get to choose your president.