What's changed

...and what hasn't.


So, here we are, finally, with a historic election and one that was way too long.

It's nice to have it over.

It would have been nice to have it over even if, God forbid, it didn't turn out the way it did--if it didn't turn out this, the right way.

No more election commercials.

I've been thinking for 24 hours about what I'd write.

About how nice it is it turned out correctly.

About how monumental the whole thing was and is, in so many different ways.

But what I've really come down with, finally, is the realization of where we are and what we have and what we've done--and where we are not and what we don't have and what we haven't done, all at once.

Yesterday, by the grace of God (I use that as purely a euphemism) and by education and experience and so many things, we elected the best man, of the last two standing, for President.

That's one of the most important things. And it's huge.

Secondly, not incidentally, he is an African-American. The first in our more than 200 year history to have done so.

That's the monumental part, certainly, as we and the world all know.

What we don't have is true equality.

The United States never has, let's be clear on that, had the equality we declared in our Constitution.

Sure, we may have had more equality than other nations or, possibly, than any other nation on the planet (who really knows?).

But when this nation began, we wrote that we insisted on "equality for all."

At the time, that meant for all property-owning white males. Period. That was all.

Then, we added, what? "People of color"? Kind of. Sort of. Even though they couldn't really vote or buy whatever property they could afford and live wherever they wanted.

Then we added women to the list of "equality".

Yeah, so they could vote but forget about equal pay. Even today, in 2008.

But yesterday, it was also proven in this election that we still aren't there in terms of true, blanket, it's for everyone equality.

While the United States voted Barack Obama to be our next President, California voted to ban marriage for same-sex couples.

No equality.

2 men or two women who want to live together and commit to one another able to have complete, legal parity to opposing sex couples.

Nah.

Nope.

Not gonna happen.

"Wouldn't be prudent."

Yeah, right.

So the fact is, we took a big step last night, to getting closer to our country's long-term goal (of what we understood we had all along, right?).

But no.

We're not all the way there.

Not yet.

We have to keep working on it.

Let's celebrate this advance, sure.

But we still have a lot of work to do.

At least we repudiated the current butt-head President, his sidekick Vice President "The Dick" Cheney, the Republicans, the Republican platform of hate and exclusion, the hating and discriminating religious Right Wing and everyone like them and in their camp.

A brief time now, to celebrate, before we slug on.