As you can see from the archives, I had written only a handful of posts when I kicked off Reschool Yourself a few months ago. The post that you’re reading now, I am proud to say, is my 100th. I find the timing excellent, because I want to take this opportunity to digress from reschooling and celebrate the election of our new president.

Tonight I want to flood the streets with my fellow Americans, whooping and carrying on like the Europeans do after their team wins a soccer match. Tonight I can say that I’m proud to be an American, and I haven’t said that in a long time.

I studied in Spain in the Fall of 2000, during the infamous election that would make the name “Chad” as unpopular for new babies as “Judas.” I voted absentee. When I went to bed the night of the election, the news channels favored Gore as the winner. When I woke up the next morning, it looked like Bush had won, but there was much rapid debate in a language I was just beginning to understand. I felt incredibly confused and desperately wanted to know what was happening. I now know I would have felt the same way if I’d been watching the coverage in the U.S. in English. When Bush was finally declared president, a lot of my American classmates said that they wished they didn’t have to go back to the U.S. We predicted the Bush presidency would be bad, but we couldn’t have imagined the magnitude of what was in store for our country.

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