Tonight

Barack Obama has just clinched the Democratic nomination for President. I am so proud of my country right now that I don't know if I can adequately capture the moment with mere words.

There are times, not often but important, when I get chills at the thought of how lucky I am to have been born in the United States and to be imbued with all of the rights and privileges that only Americans have. There are times when I have a sense that history is striking a lightning bolt into all of us, and we will someday look back and remember the moment when the universe spoke to us and what it said. There are times when I feel my heart swell with joy or pain for others, for whom I know a moment is so incredible that I will never really understand what they are feeling.

I am wrapped up in all of those feelings tonight. Someone on MSNBC earlier pointed out that on the night when Obama accepts the nomination for President in Denver, it will be the forty-fifth anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Somehow, it is so fitting that we can spot two important legs of the journey that is racial reconciliation on August 28th separated by four and a half decades. I wonder if the people who as children or young adults saw King's speech ever thought that this day would come. I hope that the dream is fully realized in 6 months, on November 4th, with the election of Barack Obama.

I am so, so incredibly proud to be an American today.