Happy Days are Here Again

by Don Silvius

My wife and I had voted several days before, actually on Halloween, which we can do in West Virginia. That was a very enjoyable experience as we went to our county courthouse and stood in line behind enough people to wind the line around a couple of times inside and out the door onto the sidewalk. It took about twenty minutes to get to the voting machines and we were early voters numbers 9888 and 9889 in our county where there were 65,000 registered voters eligible to vote on November 4, 2008.

People waiting in line were clearly excited to be there, as were my wife and I. We are traditional Democrats and have been Barack Obama supporters since before primary season got into full swing. I, personally, stated in 2004 when I heard him speak at the Democratic National Convention that if he ever ran for president, he already had my vote. So we waited in line to vote behind approximately 75 people and were finished in ˝ hour because there were many voting machines available. We will vote early again – in fact, will probably make it standard procedure.

Since I work on a college campus and interact with the students on a daily basis, I knew their level of excitement as well as their sentiments, which were the same as mine. Our “budding” health professionals were overwhelmingly pro-Obama – no real surprise since the health care in this country can use some serious change. Many of them, of course, were first-time voters and that excitement contributed to the overall excitement of voting.

Come election day, which was a day of normal class schedules, there was much talk and still more excitement and an electricity in the air. I, myself, was not convinced of the outcome, but in the preceding months, I had become addicted to CNN and those daily reports. I followed the polls online, played around with the interactive maps, etc., and on November 4, could, from memory, create a map with an outcome that turned out to be pretty close to the actual results. I think that is called an “obsession”.

At the end of the day, I went home, had dinner with our daughter (my wife has a Tuesday Jazzercise class) and we turned on CNN and watched. Knowing that we wouldn’t see an answer before 11 p.m. at the earliest, we still watched on the edge of our seats with anticipation.

Once our son arrived home from work and my wife arrived home from her Jazzercise class, we were all “abuzz” with that same excitement and anticipation. I don’t know if “abuzz” is a word, but my spell checker recognizes it, so I suppose I am okay with using it!

The numbers began to come in, and, of course, John McCain had an early lead, but Wolf Blitzer reminded us that in 2004, if early results had been an indication of the final outcome, John Kerry would have won overwhelmingly. Of course, that didn’t happen, so we chatted and watched and listened.

Early in the evening, I got the impression that our good friend, Wolf Blitzer was holding something back, like he knew something he couldn’t tell us. I did gain a lot of respect for some of the Republican analysts because they were clearly disappointed, but open-minded and objective. That is the job of these people, Rush Limbaugh take note.

So by 11 p.m., as you know, we were waiting for some big news to come as Barack Obama was within striking distance of that magic number. Almost exactly at 11 p.m., the dominoes began to fall in a big way and within a minute or two, CNN called Barack Obama the 44th American president and our family celebrated. We didn’t go outside and fire my Civil War reproduction weapon (which only is used to make noise and demonstrate history) and we didn’t bang on pots and pans with wooden spoons (as our kids did when they were smaller on New Year’s Eve), but we celebrated and we waited for the concession from John McCain and the victory speech from our new president.

By the time of the speeches, our daughter, age fourteen, had gone to bed, as had our son, but my wife and I sat in our living room and through Barack Obama’s speech, she cried like I have never seen her do before. She moved closer to me and hugged me as she has done only a few times as she cried her tears of joy, and I joined her. This was completely spontaneous, as I am not normally so emotional (she is), but after eight long years and the 2008 campaigns, we finally felt like we had someone looking out for our interest and the raw emotion took over.

Now, I know who the “good Democrats” at Shenandoah University are, and some of us had been emailing with thoughts, etc. on the election before, and on the first day of the reality of Barack Obama’s presidency, we sent our election night stories to each other. The stories were all similar – the tears of joy, the feeling that finally, we see not just the light at the end of the tunnel, but the bright future outside that tunnel.

Don’t think that we don’t see how difficult things are going to be, and day by day, we still see that things are getting more critical. We see that things that were largely ignored for the past eight years that should have been managed, are going to be managed and monitored and steps taken to turn things around. It’s going to be hard work for everyone and there’s no guarantee that it will happen at all, let alone in a short period of time.

And on that next day, Wednesday, November 5, 2008, on the campus of Shenandoah University, despite some people’s negativity, the smiles came easier and you could just feel in the air that people were happy, relieved, proud and above all, optimistic.

I have worn an American flag lapel pin every day since November 5. And at our house, for the first time in over four years, we are flying an American flag, and that flag will fly until we have to replace it with a new one, and the same will happen with the next, and the next, and so on.

Our family, like the students I work with and for, are proud and we are optimistic about our future even though there are many economic reasons not to be, the overall sentiment among the majority is that “happy days are here again.”