The presence of so many negative comments on this article just reiterates what Barack Obama said last night: “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.”

To the blatant racists: you were wrong yesterday, you are wrong today, and you’ll still be wrong tomorrow unless you can change your minds. Hopefully 8 years of Barack Obama will provide the medium and impetus you need to do that.

To the “race blind” pseudo-racists: you can’t force someone to dig a hole, push them into it, and leave them there to rot forever without generating a little resentment. Especially when you decide, grudgingly, decades or centuries later, that maybe you’ve done something wrong– it’s not enough just to call down the hole and say “oops, uh, sorry about that” and walk away. The right thing to do is to lower a rope, even if it was your daddy that forced his daddy to dig that bloody hole. Well, that rope never got lowered, and blithely pretending that the hole doesn’t exist just doesn’t cut it. Accusatorily pointing out that it has only gotten deeper is a repudiation of late-20th century history and only serves to breed further resentment.

To everyone else: I suspect that very few people voted for Barack Obama literally because of the color of his skin. What I do believe is that a lot of people voted for Barack Obama because they saw him as someone who, knowing the dangers and difficulty of the task, damn well climbed out of that figurative, historical hole anyway, using education, temerity, and hope as his only tools. And that’s something worthy of admiration, no matter how much melanin you’ve got. I hope his success provides an example for persons of every creed and color to rise above themselves and fill in that god-awful hole-in-the-ground blight-on-the-earth for all time, forgive each other, and move on.

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