A unique night.

Like them, I wept tonight, which surprised me. I never thought a cynic like me would be so emotional about an election. When my dad died in September, I was stoic by comparison. The city teens outside my downtown apartment are screaming and hollering for joy. In a difficult and draining time for America, people around the country are more alive with hope than in a long time.

Skeptics roll their eyes. "Prepare to be disappointed, you fools," they say. But if a hardened cynic like me can melt under the warmth of it all, something wonderful may be happening. My mother called from that terror-infected Pakistan, and she marveled about a sense of a new beginning, and about the world's renewed realization that Americans earnestly mean well. My younger brother's family in Ohio has sometimes been given to wondering if this country has the stomach to accept Muslims even if they love America; and they are giddy about what it means to see a man with the "dreaded" Hussein monicker rolling to a landslide. Tens of millions of people in America, and perhaps billions of people around the world, feel more than they felt ever before, that in America, they can really belong. For someone who's not a minority, it may be hard to understand this feeling of rebirth. But for me, that's perhaps why I've been more emotional about this evening than I could have imagined. "Yes, we can....."