I’ll be honest: I am writing this thing the day after the election and I can’t concentrate. All I want to do is read the news and look at all the pictures from around the world of all the happy people and just revel in this moment, which really is, just, wow. While I realize that by the time this column gets printed, some of the ecstatic elation we are currently experiencing will have worn off and settled into a calmer sense of happiness, it seems wrong in this moment to even try writing about something that doesn’t have to do with President Barack Obama.
So if, a week from now, you are already feeling nostalgic for the feeling you felt on the morning of November 5, I suggest you turn your browser to a website that has gotten a lot of play in the past month: Yes We Can (Hold Babies), and look at the many pictures on the site of Obama working the under-5 demographic. Right now, the photograph that inspired the website—a photograph of Barack Obama holding and hugging, with his eyes closed, a beaming young black boy—has been reposted along with the caption “I think this is how we all feel right now.” I couldn’t agree more. In this photograph is, just as the caption says, so much joy and hope and love; it sums up the feelings of our country right now. I could look at it for hours.
The site is funny, yes, playing as it does on the time-worn cliché of politicians connecting with the people through babies. But this site is more than that. Scrolling through it, looking at the faces of these kids, you see the next generation of voters, the children we placed our votes for yesterday. And that is hardly a cliché; that’s life, baby.
