November 5

PM: 9 miles easy

No morning workout for me after a late night with the election. Patrick and I got in a night run in the Chevy Chase neighborhoods, recalling the previous evening's events.

Overall, the most surprising part for me last night was the reaction I saw. People poured out of their homes and into the streets. Strangers hugged strangers, cars everywhere blew their horns, and fist pounds and pumps all around. The spontaneous joy of it all blew me away more than anything. This video was from the corner of U and 14th Street in DC -- the same site of some of the worst of the 1968 DC race riots, and now arguably the epicenter of youthful liberalism in the middle of a city that voted 93% for Obama. I'm not sure anywhere in the country could have beaten DC for most jubilant outpouring of emotion, save perhaps in Chicago:



Better than any celebration I've ever seen, it was sort of like Philly winning the World Series, the defeat of the Evil Empire, or the University of Maryland winning, well, just about any major sporting event...except that no one was burning anything.

Like a lot of other people in this country, my eyes welled a little listening to President Obama give his acceptance speech. But when I hear my congressman, John Lewis, talk about what it means to him, I am unbelievably moved. Lewis literally took the first hit on the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama. Compare these two videos; it's moving to see how far our country has come in the last 43 years:





Yesterday, for at least a few hours, our country silenced the cynics. And that feels pretty damn good.