OK OK one more election post.
Nov. 8th, 2008 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweedYou know how sometimes it takes something days to fully sink in? Yeah.
There are WAY better-quality, better-compiled videos of Grant Park, the moment the election was called, on YouTube, with more helicopter footage so you can see what a quarter of a million ecstatic people all jumping up and down and hugging each other against a pretty city skyline really looks like.
THIS one comes the closest to capturing what it was like for me. Blurriness, terrible intimacy, and all.
I picked this one especially because it includes the crowd reaction to the Virginia call. I had my own personal reaction to that, extremely emotional, because my home state has never gone blue in my lifetime before and I know my mom has been canvassing her ass off in usually blood-red SW VA counties for weeks. I called her immediately. She doesn't have cable (it's never been available where she lives and where I grew up- too isolated) and apparently the local news was a little behind, because what little I could hear over the pandemonium on my cell phone was "What? What? Virginia? What? He won? What?" (She couldn't hear me either.) Of course the Virginia call was the one that turned the pandemonium up to 11, because that was what started the countdown to the announcement of the West Coast poll closings, which made the impossible inevitable.
I think I shrieked something like "hewonit'sdoneit'srealIloveyouloveyouloveyoucan'thearyouhewonohgodhejustwoncrowd'sinsaneI'llcallyouback!" Then burst into tears, as did my friend Martha, all over my suede.
Later on that night I noticed my cell phone battery was in the red, but I really really really wanted her to hear at least some of his speech "live" so I called her back. The phone made it through his whole speech, ineffably.
By the way, alcohol was not sold at this event and brought-in beverages of any kind were not allowed. I mention that so you know these people are sober and still acting like that. Powerful. Jubilant. Overwhelmed. (And, as far as scans of the papers and TV for the next few days yielded up, nothing vaguely resembling any kind of "incident." Which is way better than you can say for the celebrations after big sports victories.)
There are WAY better-quality, better-compiled videos of Grant Park, the moment the election was called, on YouTube, with more helicopter footage so you can see what a quarter of a million ecstatic people all jumping up and down and hugging each other against a pretty city skyline really looks like.
THIS one comes the closest to capturing what it was like for me. Blurriness, terrible intimacy, and all.
I picked this one especially because it includes the crowd reaction to the Virginia call. I had my own personal reaction to that, extremely emotional, because my home state has never gone blue in my lifetime before and I know my mom has been canvassing her ass off in usually blood-red SW VA counties for weeks. I called her immediately. She doesn't have cable (it's never been available where she lives and where I grew up- too isolated) and apparently the local news was a little behind, because what little I could hear over the pandemonium on my cell phone was "What? What? Virginia? What? He won? What?" (She couldn't hear me either.) Of course the Virginia call was the one that turned the pandemonium up to 11, because that was what started the countdown to the announcement of the West Coast poll closings, which made the impossible inevitable.
I think I shrieked something like "hewonit'sdoneit'srealIloveyouloveyouloveyoucan'thearyouhewonohgodhejustwoncrowd'sinsaneI'llcallyouback!" Then burst into tears, as did my friend Martha, all over my suede.
Later on that night I noticed my cell phone battery was in the red, but I really really really wanted her to hear at least some of his speech "live" so I called her back. The phone made it through his whole speech, ineffably.
By the way, alcohol was not sold at this event and brought-in beverages of any kind were not allowed. I mention that so you know these people are sober and still acting like that. Powerful. Jubilant. Overwhelmed. (And, as far as scans of the papers and TV for the next few days yielded up, nothing vaguely resembling any kind of "incident." Which is way better than you can say for the celebrations after big sports victories.)
