I first voted for Hillary Clinton ten years ago, in 2006. She was a New York state senator running for (ultimately overwhelming) re-election, and I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman taking part in my very first election.
Things have changed for both of us a bit since then.
I am finally writing this diary, my first ever contribution or comment on Kos after eight years of lurking, mainly to say thank you. Because my sense and my sanity has survived, through a precarious and turbulent period of almost a decade in my personal and family life, largely thanks to the fact of discovering this community in 2008, just as the Obama-McCain race was heating up and I was a terrified 20-year-old about-to-be-college-junior heading for a long-awaited year abroad at the University of Oxford. My formative years, the first president I was old enough to follow and pay attention to (after a vague childhood memory of Bill Clinton) was George W. Bush, the War on Terror, the world of fear, uncertainty, and a fractured future that I was now faced with having to bear. Obama, like many other young people my age, was someone that I deeply connected with, felt invested in, and was moved by in the sense that I truly was convinced (and in many ways, still am) that if he didn’t win, my entire generation was at stake. After voting in the 2006 midterms in New York, my state of school residence, I changed my registration to Colorado, my home residence, because I knew my vote could help him more there than in solidly-blue NY. I gave my first ever political donation, $50, after watching his speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic Convention in my hometown of Denver. But I needed to know more, especially for someone like me: anxious, shy, depressed, and not naturally outgoing.
And then I discovered (I wish I could remember how) Daily Kos.