'Where were you when?' history moment at home in 'burbs

A bunch of sleepy suburbanites wake up for work and school Friday morning with a history hangover worthy of telling the grandkids someday.

"When I was a kid, my parents made me stay up late, perched in front of our little 50-inch, high-definition television to watch Barack Obama say, 'We are a better country than this,' as he become the first dark-skinned person to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States," they'll say.

Whatever your politics, Obama's nomination writes a new chapter in the history books for our nation.

"I'm going to remember this forever," says 17-year-old Anna Novikova during her lunch break Friday at Palatine High School, where she is a senior. Immigrants from Russia in the process of becoming American citizens, Anna and her mother, Henrietta Dombrovskaya, hosted an Obama viewing party at their home in Palatine.

"The time is now," says Anna, who cut her political teeth with Congresswoman Melissa Bean's campaign in 2006. During the last presidential election, "me telling other eighth-graders about Kerry wasn't really helping," she concedes.

Even now, Anna says only four of the people at her party will vote for Obama.

"Everybody else is too young," she says. "Even though we can't vote, we can volunteer and still have our voices heard, still impact the election."

Organizing political gatherings through the Internet carries a hint of history as well.

"This is the first time I've invited strangers to my house to watch TV," says Scott Boser, 30, who hosted a couple dozen Obama fans with his partner, Matt Guillaume, 29, in their Hoffman Estates apartment.

"Yep, it's history. The fact that we can be part of history is awesome," notes Sandy Shearer, 50, of Elk Grove Village, whose 11-year-old daughter Amanda has helped her mom work the phone bank for the Obama campaign.

"We wanted to get more involved. It's because people didn't get involved that we are in the situation we have been in these last eight years," Guillaume says. "I hope to be somewhere someday saying, 'When Barack Obama accepted the nomination, I was there.'"

That feeling of "being there" was evident at the Glen Ellyn party hosted by Celilia Guzman, a 46-year-old psychotherapist with an office in Oak Brook.

"Lots of energy and excitement - a real sense of history in the making, and of our extraordinary opportunity in our country to really turn things around with Barack Obama as president," says Guzman, a Democratic precinct captain.

More than half of the people who watched the event at her house were people she'd never met.

"We had some black folks here. I'm Hispanic. We had some Caucasians," Guzman says. "For DuPage County, it was a nice, diverse group."

At the home of Lina Goll, 57, a retired school teacher in St. Charles, a small group was less concerned about history, and more focused on the immediate future.

"We know how important this is right now," Goll says. "With us, it's less of a race issue than a class issue."

Obama's nomination is a giant leap for Obama and another small step for a nation that has been battling race issues for centuries.

It was only five years ago that Rush Limbaugh left ESPN after suggesting the media "wanted" black quarterbacks to succeed. Ebony magazine felt the need to argue that "whatever doubt remained about the ability of black quarterbacks should have been sacked after the 2000 season."

A decade that started with these very real conversations about whether a black man could actually possess the smarts and leadership ability to move 10 other football players down the field against a blitzing defense could end with Obama being the elected leader of the free world.

"You cannot divorce yourself from the idea that this is our first African-American president, hopefully," Guzman says, acknowledging the factor race plays in this election. "But we're at a point now in our collective evolution, where the sense of doing the right thing outweighs the anxiety of electing a nonwhite person."

The Republicans made history Friday by selecting "hockey mom" and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the GOP's first female vice president nominee, 24 years after the Democrats first did that.

It will be nice when today's important firsts on matters of race and gender can be nothing more than history.