burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Rest and Bread ("Prayer")

Psalm 34 and a bit from a Zaleski book about the instinct to prayer.

Laura Ruth talked about how she volunteered as a poll worker yesterday and one hour before the polls closed, the machine the completed ballots get fed into stopped working.  So they hand-recorded 1600 ballots.  She said 300 ballots passed through her hands, and she prayed over each one.  She invited us to think of a moment from today or yesterday which felt like prayer for us.

I talked about seeing post after post from all these people I know after the election was called, and that surge of positive energy -- that more than "having a Democrat in the White House" is what really makes me happy going forward.  I said I hadn't seen that in, well, ever -- I was a teenager during the Clinton years, and that was just "yay, prosperity, happy," and the 2000 election I was a senior in high school and then I've spent the last eight years surrounded by unhappy liberals.  I mean, lots of people have been excited about Obama for a while now, but this is different.

"Voter turnout best in generations" -Independent.co.uk

"Year after year after year after year having to choose between the lesser of who cares.  I'm trying to get myself excited about a candidate who can speak in complete sentences." (The West Wing)

It's not going to be easy.
All of your roadmaps are wrong.
-Velveteen Rabbi

***

The first time I got choked up was reading the metro on my way in to work this morning when I hit this on page six: "Even in reliably red states where Barack Obama had little chance of winning, unprecedented numbers of registrations and early votes were tallied, and election officials predicted a record turnout in places where neither candidate even bothered to campaign." -AP

***

I didn't watch any election coverage last night -- in part because I kept saying I was going to bed.

CNN of course showed clips of the speeches.

Barack and Michelle hugging and kissing multiple times... they looked so much like they wanted to be able to rest, but they also looked so in love with each other, and so happy.

Obama's victory speech [AP text] ( excerpts and commentary )

***

CNN showed less of McCain's concession speech [AP text; CNN video embed] than they did of Obama's victory speech (as expected), but they did show the clip of, "The American people have spoken.  And they have spoken clearly."  He sounded so... "sad" is the best word I can come up with.

It was a good concession speech.  I was talking with HBS-Mike later in the day and commenting on how encouraging it was that both candidates emphasized in their speeches the importance of all of us moving forward together -- not papering over the differences, but not encouraging divisiveness either.

***

GMA had various older African American persons talking about Obama's victory, and one woman talked about the fact that "these steps were built by slaves."  I actually cried at that point.

the_red_shoes has posts like Langston Hughes' "Let America be America again." and "I, too, sing America."

***

JadeLennox posted: "The Corner is never classy. Except when they are."

The Corner writer was at "Congressman Charlie Rangel's block party celebrating the election of Barack Obama."  He writes:

Why was I, a John McCain voter, there? A bit of personal history. I was born in 1964, and on the day I was born the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County in Virginia had to reopen its public schools. The county had closed the schools because they decided it was better to have no public schools at all than to have to admit black kids into them. Here we are, just 44 years later, with an African-American president, a president elected with the electoral votes of that very same Commonwealth of Virginia.

I voted for John McCain because I admire him immensely as a person, and agree with him on many more issues than I do with Senator Obama. And I ask a rhetorical question: Can we McCain voters, without embarrassment, shed a tear of patriotic joy about the historic significance of what just happened? And I offer a short, rhetorical answer.

Yes, we can.

***

( Prop. 8 & etc. )

+

Keith Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress (and from Minnesota, yay for my midwestern "flyover" state!), got re-elected with a 71% vote. Higher than my own Congressman, Jim Oberstar, at 67%.
-from a locked post

***

A lovely political cartoon and another post from Andrew Sullivan:

05 Nov 2008 01:19 pm
The Healing Has Begun!

Words you don't hear every day from Hugh Hewitt:

An excellent roundup from DailyKos.

***

I forgot to mention last night that Katie's polling place had "I Voted" stickers AND a bake sale -- including "sushi" (Rice Krispies® treats with Swedish fish).

Prof.B had Joe Navarro as an invited guest today and yesterday.

At like 10:30, Prof.B. says to me, "Do you want to see an interrogation?"  Sure.  And then of course I was interested in the debrief.  And then we moved to lunch.  (I was expecting Spangler, but we went to the Faculty Commons, so I ate lunch on the department dime -- though as economists will tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and my opportunity cost was actually high 'cause I'd been excited about Spangler pasta and the FacCommons has classy food which tasteless me is less a fan of.  And at one point I actually got to contribute -- I brought up the "negotiating from a position of weakness" section of Max and Deepak's book.)  I got back to my desk around 2:00.

Nicole was wearing her "Elitists for Obama" t-shirt.  I love that it looks like a very down-to-earth college t-shirt.

Edit:

Nicole got put on the spot to be the interrogatee. Someone was joking that actually this was a ruse and they were gonna interrogate me. I said, No, I still work for Prof.B., so the power dynamics are different, because if he gets on my bad side I can ruin his life. Nicole said, "I love that your sense of the power dynamics is: He can't get you too upset with him."

In the aforementioned "negotiating from a position of weakness" conversation, someone mentioned Gandhi, and someone mentioned that he had the power of the world media, and Navarro mentioned that Gandhi was trained as an attorney, which I had forgotten about.

Navarro talked about how you can change the power dynamics just by standing up. I was thinking later about how often I'll stand up when I'm at my desk and people come to talk to me, how I'll stay standing when I'm in B's office, and wondering how much that was subconscious.

/edit

***

I got dinner at Mr. Crepe.  Super Avocado Crepe = v. yummy (though I wasn't clear that there was actual avocado in it).  The chai latte, however, was really weak/watery -- which problem I also had the last time I ordered a hot chocolate there.  Sigh.  (The chai latte also had a huge amount of bleh foam.)

After dinner I was craving chocolate, so I went to CVS.  Where they still had half-price Halloween candy.  (Though srsly, candy makers?  I already knew about Chocolate Skittles, but your newest Hershey's Kisses concoction is candy corn?)

***

I went to econ class tonight for the first time in like a month instead of finishing reading Abington vs. Schempp for tomorrow's class.

( topic: competitive and non-competitive markets )

***

When FUH was leaving for the day, he said, "Have fun tonight."
I laughed and said I was going to grab dinner, go to class, check the internet when I got home at like 10:30, and then go to bed.
He said, "Maybe it'll be decided by 10:30."
I said, "But the polls on the West Coast will barely have even closed at that point, so you'l just have the really inaccurate exit polls."
He said, "But if he wins Pennsylvania and Ohio..."
I was like, oh yeah, although there are some western states in play this election, all the big swing states are on the East Coast.

We got out of class about 9:15, and a woman in my class said, "Sununu lost New Hampshire."  I was unclear as to whether she'd been getting text message updates or what ('cause class starts at 7:35, and not all the NH polls are even closed yet at that point).

kurukami linked to a nice map of the United States, color-coded by poll closing times (calibrated to Eastern Time).

I enjoyed the flurry of flist posts this morning about the midnight NH voting.

(via friendsfriends) an explanation of why America still uses the electoral process.

[Lexington] Two cheers for American democracy: A good way to pick a president [Oct 30th 2008. From The Economist print edition]