“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” Michelle Obama said a few months back as she discussed her husband’s candidacy. The remark inspired a wave of outrage in the popular press. But after Tuesday night, I know just what she meant.

We’ve elected a black man as president of the United States. Go ahead, pinch yourself. From now on, the rules of the game have changed.

Who would have thought this moment could come so soon? Who would have thought that amidst the post-9/11 jingoism and chest-thumping we could elect someone with a name like Barack Hussein Obama? Who would have thought that after eight years of waterboarding, wiretaps and war the United States could do something to make the world proud?

I certainly didn’t. Like everyone else in my generation and the generations before me I learned that the president was a white man with an Anglo name. I learned that real Americans drove pick-up trucks and waved flags. And ever since Bush was elected when I was 12 years old, I’d learned that the United States was synonymous with selfishness, ignorance and division.

But all that changed Tuesday night, and as I watched the election returns in the IBEW union hall in Pittsburgh with other Obama volunteers, it began to sink in that things might be different. When CNN flashed the news “Barack Obama Elected President” and the crowd exploded into a frenzy of jumping and dancing, it was hard not to be an optimist.

And so the future begins. The black hole of our decade can be redeemed by a movement and a leader who give voice to the new reality of America and the world — a reality that was plainly in view during the two days we spent in and around Pittsburgh.

Armed with address lists and volunteer tags, we had canvassed the predominantly white, lower middle-class communities of Greensburg and Tarentum. These are places where the voters love their guns and their God and where Steelers paraphernalia blankets every house. It’s not somewhere that, according to the old rules of politics, a young half-Kenyan liberal would have much chance of being welcomed, let alone elected. Sure, there were plenty of McCain-Palin signs and murmurings about race and religion, but across the country towns like Greensburg and Tarentum gave Obama enough votes to be president. Even 10 years ago such an outcome would have been unimaginable.

But as I walked along a row of apartments on Tuesday I came across an Obama supporter who bemoaned the fact that so many of his neighbors were voting to continue Republican rule. “You can’t fix stupid,” he told me.

The election results beg to differ. Maybe it was the significant volume of complimentary Yuengling I had consumed over the evening, but as I watched Obama’s election-night speech at the union hall I felt that for the first time in my life we had elected someone to power who was actually a good, intelligent person. Here was the next president of the United States talking about humility in victory, about tampering our enthusiasm with seriousness, about regard for the rest of the world. “What is this?” I wondered. “Is this really America?”

It is. It’s an America that’s started to wake from its isolationist slumber and to face the realities of the modern world. It’s an America that’s resisted the scare tactics and the chest-beating. It’s an America that’s beginning to overcome its deep divisions.

Or so we hope. It wasn’t so long ago that crowds were shouting for Obama’s head, remember. And at the party on Tuesday night the M.C. enjoined us to congratulate ourselves as we “take back America.” For all that Obama’s election represents, it hasn’t washed away our problems.

But there seems no one better qualified to continue that mission than the man we’ve just chosen, in a relative landslide, to be our next leader. Simply as a symbol Obama will do more than anything else in the past fifty years to heal our racial wounds. And take this passage from his victory speech: “To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

Only time will tell how significant this moment really is, but for those of us whose lives have been overshadowed by 9/11 and its aftermath, there’s finally a date we can look to with hope and pride. I’ll sum it up in the phrase that the crowd chanted on Tuesday night as we watched our country change: “Yes we did!”

Ted Hamilton is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at thamilton@cornellsun.com. Brain in a Vat appears alternate Thursdays.