November 7, 2020 is a day to never forget. It is the day that the people of the United States of America learned the news that their extraordinary effort to preserve democracy in this national beacon of hope for the entire planet had been secured. No, there was no storming of the barricades as the terrible paranoids behind the ones erected in front of the White House feared.

There was dancing in the streets, a lot of it by a lot of very happy American citizens. As more votes get counted, it is looking like this will be the biggest margin of victory for any candidate for president in the history of the U.S. Donald Trump and his fascist ambitions were not only defeated, they were crushed.

You will not be forgetting where you were and what you were doing on this date. You will be asked for years to come what it was like to celebrate the close-call survival of our democracy. You will be asked going forward how the spontaneity that accompanied this day contributed to permanent changes for the better for human society. What a year. We’d been through so much, the ongoing treachery of the Trump stain on our society, how it called out the worst in so many people, leading to rises in racial violence and police brutality. How it necessitated the calling out of the best in so many other people, who began standing up and pushing back very hard.

After all, we’d realized how much good had been bestowed upon us by this generous democratic society that we simply couldn’t sit by quietly and let the haters and bigots run roughshod over us, even if they were coming right out of the White House itself to pepper spray hundreds of us gathered there last summer so that Donald Trump could play fascist dictator with a strut across Lafayette Square to defile a perfectly good church with a pose of his unholy, sour visage.

No democratically-elected leader of our nation had ever attempted to pose in such a heinous manner before, to pose as a strong-arm dictator, clearly in the manner he hoped he could magnify with another four years in office.

So as he’d unleashed the worst out of one quarter of our compromised culture, so had he unintentionally called forth the best from another. We the people, led by our African-American constituency and our “suburban woman” constituency (as the media called it) rose up in great anger and resolve to hit the streets. That took the form of standing in long lines to vote, vote and vote.

As hundreds of thousands of us have died from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic left unattended by Trump, the rest of us stood up and exercised the best weapon that our democratic founders could have provided, the ballot.

It was like the day the Berlin Wall fell. On Nov. 7 we were liberated.