Watching History Unfold

Hi all,

Well, tonight is the night. We are all waiting in anticipation of the acceptance speech at Invesco field, of the first black man to be the nominee of a major political party for the presidency of the United States.

While most of us are tired and somewhat restless after a long few days of lots of meetings and work as well as high emotions, we are all excited about the future of this campaign and the Democratic Party.

Last night was the defining moment for me. It was last night, on the convention floor of the Pepsi Center that it hit me that I was a part of history. As I cast my vote for Barack Obama to be the Presidential nominee, it all hit me.

Logically, I knew that this was history in the making, that I was going to have front row seats to it all and that I would have the chance to cast my vote for Barack, but emotionally, I could not wrap my head around this concept.

Then, as I sat among my fellow delegates and watched as we all excitedly signed our ballots and realized that this was the moment we had all been working so hard for, the tears began streaming down my face in a flood of emotion. Realizing that this was the moment my great-grandmother, a very vocal African-American activist in the 1920's and 30's in California, had worked her entire adult life in politics to try and achieve; realizing that my grandmother, a white woman who married a black man and raised her children as the first inter-racial couple in a small conservative town in Washington, had been fighting her whole life to prove possible in America.

For my father, who is a third generation Mexican-American, working to instill cultural values in his children so that they will not forget where they come from but believe that they can go anywhere. For my children, and grandchildren, and all those who will come after me, this moment in history has been a long-time coming.

As I stood on the floor of the convention, in the moment that the rhetoric of America and the reality of our values met, I watched history unfold.

It is one of those moments, where instead of having to say "where were you when 9/11 happened" - one of the greatest tragedies in American history and by far the worst in my lifetime, I will now be able to answer "where was I when we voted for a change in America, where was I when America stood up and took it's country back? - I was in Denver, Colorado the day America changed the course of history.

--kristine