What do you know..

November 04, 2008 | Published in | 0 comments

I barely clocked a four hour nap before waking up again to see "Obama wins elections in historic win" on my laptop screen. Needless to say, I am elated. Tired, aching and very sleepy, but very happy for Mr. Obama and that much more optimistic about the future of the world. It touches me to know that I actually witnessed history happening and that America was willing to let change happen. I always said that the world was going to end if Mr. McCain won, but now that I think about it..a black man just became the president of the United States. 143 years ago, he could very well have been a slave on the plantation of some wealthy cotton farmer in Atlanta. Well, Change has come. If a black man can be the president of the United States, now anything is truly possible.

Mr. Obama won out of sheer tenacity, of extraordinary focus and pure guts. He never once strayed from his goal in his two year campaign. He didn't do what Mr. McCain did - Mr. McCain childishly played taunting games on international television with Mr. Obama, calling him all manner of names. Mr. Obama played on the absence of feeling of hope for the Americans and gave it back to them. Mr. Obama is playing Richard Nixon's role to Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson's Vietnam. The paranoia that the Domino Theory would come true as communism swept its way through South East Asia perhaps is more palpable and believable than these so-called weapons of mass destruction that - funnily enough - nobody has found yet. Mr. Obama knows the catastrophe that the Bush administration has left him in and he certainly won't have a ball cleaning up. His administration will have to be transparent, fair and well thought out - everything the Bush administration was not.

I am not typically a fan of politics and I do not talk politics, but this time the little idealistic historian in me believed that something different would go down in history. And it has.

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