There were so many unprecedented precedents achieved in this US election: the first female presidential candidate, the first Republican female vice-presidential candidate, the first black presidential candidate, the largest voter turnout in the history of the U.S. and the first time I ever voted at a polling place. I’ve never seen such a display of politicism by voters. I heard that parents who dropped their kids off at elementary school and kindergarten overheard young citizens discussing whom they thought would be the best president or what measures they felt needed to be passed. When walking to my polling place, I saw a man standing on that oh-so contested corner, now empty but for him, wearing a red and white-striped cape and brandishing a sign that said: “Before you go to the polls, ask what God would he do”

At 8 PM, the major networks announced that Barack Obama was our newly elected leader. AH and I were together. We acknowledged the absolute jubilation onscrean–streamers, banners, horns and confetti. We acknowledged that that jubilation only mirrored half the thoughts of the citizens of this country. We thought about the slogan being posted on websites everywhere: “Change is here.” And we thought about how tenuous that promise was even at this hopeful new beginning.

Most of all, we remember our Allen Ginsberg and a poem he once penned to America’s poet that says:

      Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors 
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point 
tonight? […]
       Will we walk all night through solitary streets? […]
       Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love 
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent 
cottage?
       Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-
teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit 
poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank 
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black 
waters of Lethe?

excerpt from “A Supermarket in California” (1955)