You were not here, Taran - so I will tell you what you could not see. This has been the most exhilarating election day that I have ever, in my 61 years, ever-ever seen. Walking around, there were few people who did not sport an "I voted" sticker somewhere on his person. There were high fives at the voting place, friends seeing one another and glad to be seen. People who have never voted in their lives voted today. They did not all vote for PE Obama.

Some had not done the research and believed so many of the lies that were circulating throughout the campaign. I spoke to a young lady that I love dearly and was told she had voted against Obama because he didn't put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegience. She never checked with Snopes.com - my standard for truth or lie; nor did she check the Washington Post fact-checker site for background, for facts. When I heard this beautiful young woman say this, I was struck with a fleeting feeling of guilt - I should have told her how to check this stuff, I should have realized how young she is. When she told me her mom voted the same way - I was aghast. I feel that I failed them somehow. Then I realized that it is not only up to me to crawl into their minds and show them the referenced answers to their questions and the dirtiness of the mudslingers. They were supposed to be doing it themselves. I'd forgotten that someone needed to show them how.

And today, in television interviews, I am still hearing partial truths, like the man who spoke of "spreading the wealth around" as an Obama policy that would take the hard work of his small business and fling it out to the masses. What he has been fed by the Obama Opposition is just that. In fact, there has been a system intact for decades that does just that. The IRS tax brackets require those who earn more to pay more. It is that simple. But reworded, as those supporting Mr. McCain did and publicized, it sound horrid. That was their purpose, perhaps knowing better than I that so many of us will take their word for it and not check the facts.

But there is time to check them now. The young lady I spoke to last night said she wished she had gotten the e-mails that debunked the information she had been fed. I could have done that, and I feel bad that I did not. But she can check now, and I hope she and many who were lied to about this fine man will do just that, and allow the unity to take place in this country that is going to move forward in a far different direction than the direction in which we have been pulled in the past eight years.

But the feeling of exhilaration continues this morning - in me and in those around me. We finally have a time coming, very soon, when the deciding figure in the White House will be considering those of us in the domestic trenches who have been robbed of our dignity, some of us our jobs and homes and savings, in the last eight years. There are still high-fives, smiles and a sense of joy rampant around me, and I am going to go to work now and enjoy it. But you should have seen it, Taran. It would have made you proud to have been born in the USA.