My Election

My campaign registered over 2300 students at Berkeley. We reminded over 8000 to vote. Texts, phone calls, banners...
Can't sleep. I wake up and worry about prop 8. Dream about it. Prop 4, too. Funny, my subconscious mind is more concerned with these than with Obama winning.
Get up. Take my cruelly timed midterm. Don't do so well... Do not care right now.
Nervous. Very, very nervous. Forget to eat.

I vote! I remind more people to vote!

The night starts at the Bear's Lair... Steven Colbert is going to bash his head in at the end of the night. Jon Stewart looks very, very happy. There is a cockatoo involved, for some reason or another. I move to Sinead's room. Stewart calls it at 8: Obama. We can't celebrate yet - it could be a mistake. Not enough votes are in, we can't quite tell. CNN calls it: Obama. KRON 4 calls it: Obama. Even FOX calls it: Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the United States. My mom calls in tears: "We did it...!" We scream. Hordes of people gather around the window, around Telegraph, around Sproul, screaming and cheering. McCain gives his concession speech; Palin refuses to comment on the defeat. We break out Colbert's "Americone Dream" Ice Cream: we had hoped to use it for this - for celebration - and not to drown our sorrows in. We cry, hug, hi-five, scream out the window.

We storm the streets. The mob runs all around the dorms, down Telegraph, through campus... No one knows where we are going, but it doesn't matter: we are happy, happy sheeple. We wind up at the Free Speech Cafe, cheer and then turn around - no one knows why we stopped there in the first place. People scream Obama's name in the libraries. The conservatives of Berkeley are nowhere to be found; perhaps they are hiding in their rooms. The bus drivers are even clapping and honking. People are cheering on top of police cars and busses. They try to scale Sather Tower to cheer from there. We are on CNN!

"Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!"

Gina is in tears - she seems so relieved. Molly runs through Berkeley barefoot. The past two years of her life have paid off.

We go back to the dorms to celebrate and stare at the propositions. 1A not doing well. Shit. 8 doing well. Double shit. Sinead goes back home. I go back out.

Jen's apartment - CalPIRG gathering. Danielle's already high - smell that Berkeley pot. Febreeze. I finally get my JD. Not as good as I remember.

Prop 1A is ahead! 51%, 51.2%, 51.7%, 52%!!! Ariel says we've got it but has to knock on wood and spin around in circles: Danielle is superstitious. 8 still leading, but by a smaller margin now. 4 looks like its going down.

We wait. And watch. And wait. And watch. We go home - it's 3am. Tomorrow will tell.

Please die, 8. Please die. DIE a horrible, gruesome, bloody death. Californians cannot be this unjust, this discriminatory, this sadistic. Can they?

But whether we win or lose these battles, there is HOPE because we WON the big one. The fight for equal rights has been a struggle for every group who has fought for it. If prop 8 passes, it will not cease being a fight. If prop 1A fails, we will still fight for infrastructure. For the environment.

But Obama? Obama has won. Obama can help us bring about these changes, even if we do not win them tonight. We WORK and HOPE and FIGHT for the change this country needs.

We WON. But now, we WAIT.