Hello, Pippa,

Welcome to the world from your Aunt Lisa.

You arrived, the first child of my youngest brother and sister-in-law, just days before your country made history and elected Barack Obama to the White House.

I hope change comes long before you reach voting age in 2026.

I hope change comes before you reach kindergarten.

Some votes made election day bittersweet for me, my partner, and so many of my friends and colleagues.

Unkind or uninformed people approved some very cruel propositions on Nov. 4.

In California, voters approved a measure to change their state constitution to revoke equal marriage rights.

In Arizona, too, a measure against marriage equality passed.

In Florida, where I live, voters approved a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman and invalidate any other “legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof.”

Arkansas voters approved perhaps the cruelest measure, one that prohibits unmarried people from adopting children or serving as foster parents. You don’t understand, Pippa, but children will be denied loving parents and safe homes because of this vote. And I know, in short time Pippa, you will know the value of your loving parents.

I think, if you hadn’t been born, I might be feeling rage today, some days now past the election.

My friends feel outrage.

Neighbors and acquaintances I encouraged to vote “no” feel outrage.

I feel differently.

I feel sadness over the loss, especially in California, where couples earlier this year had made their marriages legal, and disappointment in those who voted “yes” because they believe foolish lies and myths and because they simply must be so selfish.

But I feel proud of those who voted “no,” especially the straight allies who high-fived me in the supermarket and said, “I’m with you,” and who cried on election night when the numbers rolled across their TV screens.

I feel optimistic, too, because of the bigger American vote on Nov. 4, because of the energy behind that vote and because of the mandate for change that vote delivered.

Maybe, Pippa, I feel an obligation to be optimistic for you, to convince you that I believe in change, that “Yes we can.”

On election night, in a park not far from where you live, the first president you will know and my new president addressed a global audience. You probably were sleeping then, perhaps in the arms of your mother or father as they watched President-elect Obama speak.

He reminded us that while we have experienced a transformational campaign and a historical election, the real change is going to come.

He said, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

“It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

“So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.”

Pippa, this is the time you were born into, a new era, a new spirit, a new atmosphere. I hope you never experience a time like the period America is leaving behind, eight years of fear and greed, prejudice and intolerance, war and hate.

I believe the American mood of the least eight years resulted in the passage of those amendments in Florida, Arizona, Arkansas and California.

Why the vote for change did not translate into the defeat of those measures I cannot say, for certainly they are of the ugly, mean, conservative America of yesterday and not the change we seek.

Our president elect asked, on election night, “If our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as [106-year-old] Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?”

We can achieve much, Pippa, yes we can.