I woke up this morning feeling surreal. Did this really happen? Did we really elect him? Did we just witness history?

The answer is holy crap, YES. YES, I lived through and witnessed something amazing. All of a sudden, for an exquisite moment, the weight of humankind’s past story and future hopes and all of our progress was so palpable I could perhaps poke it. Jess said to me, “Years from now your children will be amazed that you were there. That you cast a vote that helped put Barack Obama in office. They will ask you, ‘What were you doing when the results came in? What were you doing when history was made?’” (And I will say, “Uh, doing some art project I think.”)

But yes, forget the theoretical children. I can hardly believe it myself. We were all there!

And today, I am so elated and inspired and, dare I say it, hopeful that I can hardly concentrate on work. This is proof that the democratic process works, that the people can get their voices heard, that the US can overcome the inertia of the powerful conservative heartland and move on to try something new.

Only time will tell if “something new” is something positive, but I don’t think we will have hoped in vain. I think that riding on the wings of optimism alone, an emotion which the former Senator was so great at instilling, will tide us through many the problems we’ve piled onto ourselves. It may just be a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing.

Oh man. I’ve never been this riled up over an election before. But did I mention this was remarkable?

I read an interesting article in the NYT last week while researching the fate of Burt’s Bees. We’ve all heard the sad story about how it was bought out by evil chemical giant Clorox, and woe is small companies, etc. But the article offered another view – instead of lamenting the demise of BB as the small independently owned company we all knew and loved, we ought to be celebrating its influence on more mainstream, more environmentally calloused corporations…

As a somewhat wary greenie and also a generally suspicious person, I read this as sneaky marketing on Clorox’s part. Which it probably is. “Nice try, Clorox,” I thought to myself, “But I will continue to boycott BB lip balm in protest of your conniving business moves, even though BB lip balm is one of the best out there.”

But then as I thought about the article, I slowly changed my mind. Maybe the financial analysts are right – maybe we’re actually doing no one any favors by boycotting traditionally “bad” companies’ attempts at self-reform. So what if the self-reform still has to do with profit? The goal of environmentalism is not to make companies and their stockholders poor, but to save the planet. And in order the save the planet, we  need the big product and profit makers to cooperate. And to get them to cooperate, we need to get them to think that, yes, green products do sell better. Speak their language, so to speak.

It’s helpful now that it is actually cool and hip to be green. (No more dirty hippies. The contemporary greenie is a spritely 20-something who drives a fuel efficient sexy car and shops at Whole Foods.) Very very helpful. (I like to think that graphic design was at least partially to blame for this fortuitous turn of events.)

I’ve never thought about it this way before because I’ve always instinctively hated green marketing (most of it smacks of greenwashing). But you know what, if Clorox actually can reduce its environmental impact to zero (Ok scientists, get to work researching non-harmful bleach) and keep true to its word about heading towards greater responsibility… then good for it. Good for all of us.