y life is long enough to pinpoint moments of great historical significance by playing the "Where were you when" game.

That's the game we play when we ask ourselves where we were when JFK was killed, when Bobby was assassinated, when Dr. King was murdered, when Neil planted the flag, when the towers fell, when....

Well, when ...THAT... happened.

Substitute your own favorite historical moment for the ...THAT... in the sentence above and you can play, too.

Tonight I had another one of those moments. I'll always remember where I was when I saw the CNN headline saying that Barak Obama won.

For more than 40 years I have despaired of Dr. King's dream ever becoming a reality. As much as I hoped and prayed for it to be true, in my heart of hearts I really know that the good guys only win in the movies. No matter how much I wanted to believe it to be true, in real life the good guys have almost never won.

Nixon got away with it even when we knew he was a crook before the landslide victory that ushered him into his second term. He even got Ford to pardon him on national TV right before our eyes. Bush has been getting away with it for the last eight years even though we knew his brother stole the first election right on national TV right before our eyes. Clinton had me believing that there was a chance the good guys might actually pull one out of the fire, but he had to give it all up for a blow job....on national TV almost right before our eyes.

I fully expected Obama to lose tonight. Despite the polls showing him in the lead, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept waiting for CNN to tell me McCain was pulling ahead. I kept expecting secret, hidden bigotry to overpower people's better instincts.

I surprised myself by how much I was hoping for this victory to happen, and how hard it hit me when it really did. I stood in my living room watching the screen, unable even to sit down in comfort while tears of absolute joy streamed down my face and lodged uncomfortably in my beard. I watched the faces of young people in Chicago waiting to hear from Barak with smiles on their unsullied, uncynical faces while four decades of my own hard-boiled cynicism melted in the light of hope.

I hope this is real. I hope I won't wake up tomorrow to find that it was a dream. I hope I can keep these feelings of unashamed optimism and hope alive. I hope that despite how much further we still have to go, we are able to embrace this change and embark on a new world order of understanding, tolerance, peace, and prosperity.

Then I turn to the local results and see that California's Proposition 8 has been accepted by a majority of voters. Prop 8 asked voters to demand that marriage in the state of California be restricted to the union of a man and a woman, to the exclusion of gay couples. Just weeks after it became law in California that gay people would have to be treated as equals, a majority of voters decided to turn the clock back and endorse hatred and bigotry instead.

Yeah, there's still a long way to go. I hope I can still keep my optimistic spirit going. I hope I can keep fighting bigotry in the world without becoming jaded and giving up. I am happy that part of Dr. King's dream has been realized tonight, even if it came packaged with an abrupt reminder that hatred has not given up the fight yet.

I want to believe the good guys win. I want to believe that love conquers all. I don't want to have to think it is all useless.

It's only been 40 years of progress in the face of thousands of years of ignorance, brutality and hatred after all. I'm not ready to give up yet, even in the face of proposition 8.

Barak won. Hope is still alive. We can make a difference. We can change the world.

Yes, we can.

-=b=-