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Seventeen hours now.

We’re almost there.  Those of us that have behaved as though there was and is no good reason why people of different creeds, and of different races, should be pitted against one another; why anyone that chooses a system of belief that is different than his or her neighbor so long as they do not work to undermine the right of that neighbor to do the same should be sequestered and questioned by the law; why anyone that is of a darker, or lighter, tone, should be considered first inferior; we are close now to sending a message to the world.  We believe in something better, and something greater, than the desperate clinging to a hegemony that discourages equity.  And so, once again, we will move in the direction of being governed by the power of the many, rather than the demagoguery of the few.

It is nearly time and we have long been waiting for this day to arrive, when the land that has long hosted the persecuted and so too has built itself up on the backs of the enslaved and the purposefully forgotten rises up a great many steps towards fulfilling its promise to us all; that because these truths are self-evident, and for so long as we hold them so, we will commit ourselves to the will of our people, for they all, everywhere, are and always have been created equal.  We all, each of us, are endowed with these inalienable rights for only so long as we work to protect them against those that wish to tear them apart, to take them away; these rights for which we must always strive, and for which we must at times fight, so that our government continues to derive its power from the will and the consent of the governed.

Let us not forget that for so long as that place where the best of our will would live there remains only vacancy we shall receive the worst of government as it will represent the cumulative power of the worst in us.  For so long as we turn our backs, choose apathy over action, seek to deride the power to choose to hope for something better and to put our attention and our efforts towards that notion, we will receive the government we create.

I hope tomorrow is the first of many lights.  I hope that we have seen the beginning of something new and lasting.  Not an effortless peace and a mindless good will towards our fellow human being but rather, a commitment we begin to make to one another, by which we emerge from the darkness that has been all around us, and has kept us apart.  Let tomorrow be the first of many days of our coming closer together, and though I do not believe there is a greater force than that of the nature that brought us all here, I suspect that we shall remain here well, longer, if we seek to love and to protect what is best in all of us.