To Reach the Dream, You Have to Learn to Dream

The landslide victory by President Barack Obama is a surprise that should make many think. Just yesterday morning, polls, analysts and social media users continued to confirm that it would absolutely be an even election and that he, just like the Republican Mitt Romney, had a chance to win after counting the votes. At midnight not only was it known that Obama would be reelected, but that he would achieve it with a significant majority in his favor.

Countries change; if the United States’ society has one characteristic it’s its constant process of social dynamism, an expansive force that not all political leaders in the world know or understand adequately. What we can call the “traditionalist American conservative” voted mainly for a candidate that showed conservatism. Clearly, that is no longer enough. Different communities voted for Obama, those that need to fight daily for their survival and consolidation and that are becoming the strongest representatives of the pioneering spirit, which led the United States to be the world’s number one socioeconomic power.

Romney presented himself as the example of the much talked about but also very traditional “American way”; Obama has been interpreted as a leader and as an expression of a process that fights, expands, wins positions, rights and recognition, fighting without rest day after day.

But the changes that the United States experiences and that Obama leads and the WASP tradition that Romney symbolizes constitute an extremely American conviction of freedom, of respect to duties as well as rights and to the concept of democracy and nation established in the Constitution. This conviction has continued, in full, for more than 200 years, without mix-ups or legal ties, without soldiers with guns in voting centers, without paralyzing the country so that its citizens vote, without the government of the world’s most powerful country also governing the branches and institutions of the nation.

We have to think about those Americans from the 21st century, the ones we have to study and understand. The black, Hispanic and Asian communities and women all throughout the United States went out massively to vote for Obama — not because he’s African-American, but because he’s like them, because he had to fight for his dreams day after day, because he was never afraid of defeat, but his objective was always to win. To dream, you have to be willing to give everything to make that dream.

Think about that on December 16.