Native Son

I don't care who you rooted for, this is about Chicago's embrace of the president elect and not what I think. At Grant Park on Tuesday night, I was surprised by how many families were there with little kids way past their bedtime. But those parents wanted to make sure that those children never forgot that night.

And the next morning, the sun and the realities of the work day could not wipe the euphoria and pride away from the city. The banners (above) were all up by the morning. Newsstands all over the city found themselves selling out as people lined up to buy a copy of the historic paper. We walked by a guy being interviewed and he said that on a normal day, he might sell 60 papers (heartbreaking, considering how cheap papers are and how rough selling them is), but on Wednesday, he had sold about 2,000 and it was only 3PM. One woman in line had returned to buy ten more to send to her relatives all over the country. And when Gak and I traveled away from downtown, through a predominantly black neighborhood and down a strip filled with stores selling dapper suits and snappy shoes, we bumped into a man coming out of a store. He started talking to us about voting and when we answered who we had voted for. When we told him, he shook our hands and genuinely thanked us for doing so.