Richmond, Virginia last night

Shortly after 11pm, after CNN had called the election and announced that Virginia was going for Barack, I got phone calls from my two sons. The first called from Clemson, South Carolina to let me know that "we'd won." We talked a bit about South Carolina and how eventually, they'd get there too.

My other son called from Richmond, where he's a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he told me that the students there were flooding the streets, singing, yelling, beeping car horns, setting off fireworks, etc. A half hour later he called me to let me know that he was in the middle of an impromptu parade, that they'd shut down six lanes of traffic on Broad Street, and were marching together toward the Capitol. When they got there, the crowd stopped and sang The Star Spangled Banner.

The significance of this celebration, in Richmond, in the state of Virginia, where our nation was founded, in a city that was built on the slave trade and slave labor in the tobacco plantations of the Old Dominion, was almost overwhelming. Nick said, "We've come full circle."