"Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama. As a conservative who has been fearful of an Obama victory for the last several months, I'm more than a little surprised at how calm I am with the dreaded result and how stress-free it is to offer genuine felicitations for the historic win.
Part of my tranquil demeanor comes because of the historic significance of the outcome. Our nation just elected an African-American as our next president of the United States. No matter party or ideology, that color-blind advancement in our electoral process has to make all of us proud.
Another reason for my serenity comes by way of my background. I grew up in abject poverty and was homeless a number of times as a child. By the time I was 17 years old, I had moved 34 times with each move coming because of a forced and often ugly eviction.
I mention that because a number of those evictions deposited me in poor, majority black neighborhoods and schools. I've talked and written about it often in the past, but I honestly look back upon those dysfunctional and traumatic years as more of a gift than a burden. I say that because as a white child, poverty and the random destination of those moves brought me face to face with an enduring truth: my young black friends were no different than me. They were just other forgotten and faceless poor children who were desperately trying to escape an existence forced upon them by the accident of birth. Color made no difference to any of us."
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