Mr. President

I'm trying hard not to let my thoughts wander to an Obama victory for a variety reasons. The most of important of which is that I become very emotional. It disturbs me on a visceral level that we built our country through the use of human slaves. I can almost not bear to think about it - the trading and selling of humans, breaking families apart, the beatings, the hardships.

This became difficult for me in 8th grade when I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Huck and Jim are on the raft, and Jim tells Huck he's looking to get free so he can earn some money to buy his family back, it hit me hard. I still think about it some 35 years later.

I argued with my aunt a few years ago about whether we'd have a woman or a black president first. We both thought either would be difficult, but she believed that women faced more difficult obstacles. I thought that racism was alive and well in too many states, both south and north, east and west, and it would be too difficult to overcome.

And if you had included into the discussion that the first black president would be named Barack Hussein Obama, I would not have taken it seriously. So, we are on the cusp of our first African-American Presidency. Remarkable.