… and still the journey continues.

Someone mentioned the topic in an offhand remark to ye old scribe the other day, and it struck such a chord that felt compelled to do some research.

At the time of President-elect Obama’s birth, his parents’ marriage was still illegal in 22 states of the U.S.

Of those 22, President-elect Obama won majorities in 6 this past Tuesday.

Equality is not a commodity, it is an inalienable right. Equality is a core value, it is the fuel in the lamp of liberty.

What this historic day — one of those few which imprints in totality in memory — demonstrates most clearly is the ineffable, irreversible, overdue and welcome socio-political movement from acceptance (too often qualified, too often grudging, too often token) to publicly validated, full-throated, sea to shining sea and writ in stone inclusion.

That is one Brobdingnagian stride — perhaps the most colossal non-violent act of closure in American history — from which we can all take heart.

The hallmarks of the Obama campaign remained equanimity, consistency and maturity.

Equanimity bred comfort with both the candidate and with his candidacy.

Consistency, tempered by trial, begat authenticity.

Maturity spotlighted expression designed to appeal to reason vs. emotion squarely on center stage.

All three combined moved the campaign and the candidate beyond the politics of fear so evident over the recent past (and the ballooned hallmark of the woebegone Bush administration). All three converged in a recognition that fear is not a nourishing diet: that the bulk of America’s public had either had enough of fear, or had worked past or internalized fear, plus recognizing a segment which carried a psychic bucket of fear already full, which could not and would not accommodate any more.

All three point to the ascendance of a philosophy of merit via consensus, not advantage.

It is more than “Yes we can.” It is “Yes, we have.”

The Obama victory is a confirmation of the promise of the democracy of E Pluribus Unum.

That the American public — that the public across the globe — now categorically knows that what happened today can happen not only obliterates scores of threadbare shibboleths but is perhaps equally as momentous as what has happened.

With skill, with some luck and with hard work, an Obama administration will close the book on the Reagan-era mantra of “government is the problem” and re-invigorate the “of the people, by the people and for the people” principle and its twin corollaries: that no government is no solution and that governance, not government, is what can impede progress.