Here is the ever eloquent Bruce Coville's essay:

THIS I DREAM… for OUR VOTE
by Bruce Coville

I've Been Waiting Forty Years

It's hard for anyone who wasn't there to understand what 1968 was like. Even harder, perhaps, to understand what it was like to come of age in the late 60's. It was a time of enormous hope, unbelievable possibility, and crushing loss. I was seventeen the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I can still remember the pain of hearing that news. And I was a white kid in the north, so my pain was as nothing compared to that of the folk who were really invested in him. I remember where I was the morning I heard that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I remember the insanity of the 1968 Democratic convention when Eugene McCarthy, the first politician to whom I gave my heart, was shoved aside so the political machine could continue with Hubert Humphrey, a once great man who had been compromised by his loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, a once great man made insane by the trap of the Vietnam War.

I remember the hope, and I remember the loss. I remember the way dreams died at Kent State.

And my heart has been broken for forty years, mourning for the country that I love, and the dreams that I grew up with.

Let me make it clear. I'm a left wing liberal who is wildly patriotic, in love with this country because of what I learned in church, the boy scouts, and my public school social studies classes. I know how to fold and care for a flag, which is more than I can say for some who claim to honor the flag but leave it hanging outside, faded and tattered, in all sorts of weather. All I have ever wanted is for us to be what I was taught we are: the home of hope and freedom.

Heck, it was believing what I was taught about who we are that made me an activist to begin with. I just wanted us to mean what we said.

As a result, I've spent forty years with a broken heart. And now—like the guy who has been dumped a dozen times, but is ready to give love one last chance—I'm filled with hope again. And it scares me. Because I don't know if I can take having my heart broken one more time.

But this time it feels different. It really does.

This time it starts to feel like, after forty years that we may be ready to come home to our own best selves.

I have wept buckets of tears over the campaign of 2008, but they are the best tears, the tears of joy, the tears of hope, the tears of dreams, the tears of "Yes we can."

In Barack Obama, in the gathering that he has inspired of young and old; the gathering of black, white, Latino, Asian, and every other ethnic group imaginable; the gathering of straight and gay; the gathering of old line Democrats and Republicans ready for something new, I feel the kind of hope that was crushed forty years ago.

I deeply love this country, and I have been waiting forty years for it to come to its senses.

I'm willing to fall in love one more time. To let myself go. To dream.

I dream that children will discover their own passion and love for America through a political process that is fair and clear and honest. I dream that my passion for this nation will help light a flame in children's hearts to participate fully in our national life, especially by registering to vote when they are 18, and then exercising that astonishing privilege. I dream that they will use that cherished right as a torch to light their way…

and ours.