and all of a sudden, hope

...so the United States has a new President. I can’t explain how excited I am, or even necessarily why. He’s black, and I’m effervescent with happiness about the most visible political force in the world having a black face, given the proportion of the world – and of US citizens – who see black faces in the mirror every single morning and yet have had to wait this long to see it reflected back to them from the political looking glass. He stood staunchly for women’s reproductive rights, and has a wife who isn’t going to be anyone’s shadow. That bodes well. He knows our oil days are and must be numbered, and is willing to be bold in finding solutions.

These could all be reasons I might have cast my vote for him, had I the chance.

But the main reason is just that he made it an election about hope. And enough people tilted their heads and listened and were lit up by his dogged hope to start a glow that’s gathered enough luminescence to banish the darkness of the past 8 years.

I could only ever vote for hope.

So now I want to know, how long will my homeland wait for its own black Prime Minister? Because as buoying as today’s world news is, a sad voice inside me thinks that may not be something I’ll ever live to see happen in Australia. People who weren’t bought and sold but enslaved anyway, people who cared for the land and all its inhabitants far better than its immigrants ever have.

But today’s all about the hope. I’m keeping my own small candle lit.