New York is fired up!

This morning the third graders at the Neighborhood School in the East Village greeted each other with a collection of impromptu, wiggling jiggling victory dances and shouts of "O-BA-ma, O-BA-ma!", sung in the hip hop way. The Lower East Side was jamming all night, with St. Mark's blocked off between 1st Avenue and Avenue A (see some video footage here); Tompkins Square Park was full of spontaneous reveling too, I hear tell. This morning in the newsstand, the Palestinian guy behind the counter gave me the high-five (we've been fretting about the election outcome every day for weeks). An old woman in there started crying. "I've been crying all night," she said. A black man in line patted her on the arm and said, "What you crying for, we won!" Yes, why all these tears? Tears of joy. Tears of relief. In the coffee store, I saw an old colleague who said, "And that speech! Pitch perfect." Yes. In New York, we are happy and crying and beside ourselves. It feels like it should be a national holiday, like they're having in Kenya. Obama's right; this isn't even about Obama; it's about us. We did it. So why not let us enjoy it, for a minute or two. A cabbie from Ghana told me, "This man is going to show what a good leader can be." Let's hope. Right now he has the goodwill of the entire world (except, bizarrely, Russia; why you wanna hate?), and definitely the funky badass Lower East Side of New York.