I'm not really much of a morning person, yet here I am wide awake two hours before I need to get up for the day.

I went to bed around midnight, and it's 5:30 now, and the world around me has literally changed -- we have a fresh layer of snow on the ground this morning here in Vail.

None of this has sunk in yet.

That America could fall for George Bush just 48 months ago, and then suddenly favor -- by a landslide -- some black guy with a foreign name, who wants to talk to your five year olds about sex while palling around with terrorists, redistribute your hard-earned money and property, seeks the destruction of Israel and "doesn't see America the way you and I do;" is unreal.

Yesterday was an electoral Iwo Jima for Generation X.

It was a combined effort from a number of Americans to earnestly raise our flag once again, after it had been battered, tattered and misrepresented over the last eight years.

I'm not sure we even fully appreciate what just happened yesterday, but the 80 to 90 percent of people over the world who were pulling for Obama may have an idea of what it means.
Jon Stewart, in the closing minutes of the program last night, when an Obama victory was evident, said something to the effect that our nation has finally lived up to its promise; that we could show and not just tell.

And Obama is the embodiment of the American dream, regardless of what you think about his politics. Raised on food stamps, he rose to the top of his class, excelled in the Ivy League, remained humble enough to lend a hand to people having a rough time in his state, and somehow managed to beat the Clinton political machine last year. As Giuliani said, but without the dickish overtone, "Only in America."

Grant Park, where the melting pot of a million-plus people gathered to hear our president-elect speak for the first time, was the epicenter of the '68 riots that found us at one of our lowest points. That so many waited so many hours just to see some politician speak for a few minutes is by itself remarkable.

I'm coolly drinking all this in, then the polls close on the West Coast. I watched the election mix channel on DirecTV, which was actually eight different mini-screens of election coverage on a single channel.

One by one, within the span of maybe 10 seconds, the screens all flip with the announcement Obama will be our next president.

And then someone in that sea of faces at Grant Park vibrantly waved a huge American flag, and I lost it.

Our curse was broken as a nation. It wasn't that McCain would have been that bad of a president so much as it was a statement that -- hey, we're in a bind, and we'll take the most talented guy available instead of a war hero.

And it didn't matter one damn bit what color his skin was or what his name sounded like.
Obama never ran as a black candidate, or even as the democratic candidate. Through his words, he sounded to a lot of Gen-Xers, who missed out on the Kennedy brothers, like someone out of a history book with his fiercely intelligent framing of issues delivered with eloquence.

We spat out the venomous and shallow Rovian smear politics in one fell swoop.

To finally see the American flag hoisted and waving in the night air, to see tears streaming down people's faces as the news rushes over them, to know that hope finally conquered fear in an election...well, it was something special.

Then our 44th president came out for what could have easily been an over-hyped victory lap.
But he again rose to the occasion and didn't make the evening about him, but about us. Through the eyes of the 106-year-old woman from Atlanta, we saw ourselves grow up as a nation.

We've made a statement about who we really are as a nation, and Lady Liberty has never looked sexier.

My dogs are out in the pre-dawn, romping around on a fresh layer of snow.

For all of us, the sun can't rise fast enough.