Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon.

– Vaclav Havel

I was out of town last week, but I’m told there was an election and some fellow named Barack won. This news was evidently received with good cheer bordering on jubilation throughout the world. Pundits predict change is in the air. Who knew?

Commentators far more eloquent than I have already waxed both poetic and profane on the significance of the election of a man to the presidency of the United States who, not all that many years ago, would have found it difficult to be served lunch in many restaurants across this great nation.

The election offered many fascinating incongruities suggesting that we as a people may have turned some sort of a socio-political corner. For example, consider that in 1962, Alabama Democrats chose George Wallace as their candidate for governor. Wallace ran on a platform of “Segregation now, Segregation forever.” In 2008, those same Alabama Democrats chose Barack Obama for president. Bob Dylan was right. The times they are a changin’.

If you watched the coverage of the election on television and saw aging civil rights warrior Jesse Jackson crying and students at Spellman University in Atlanta alternately crying and dancing in the streets in unrestrained joy over the election of America’s first African-American president and didn’t tear up yourself, then you are made of sterner stuff than I.

African Americans who see in Obama the realization of their hopes and dreams for equality and justice can be expected to shed a tear or two of joy and gratitude and relief. The tears of the rest of us are slightly harder to explain.

William Greider said in an opinion piece in The Nation that great moments in history give emotional definition to our lives and we carry those feelings forward with us, creating our own private meaning of events. And this election was undeniably a great moment in history. The problem with many past presidential elections was the sad realization that one of the two candidates was going to have to win.

The election is over, but now the real work begins, and there is a daunting list of chores facing President-elect Obama. Before we get all misty eyed and sentimental about how “the people have spoken” and therefore everything is going to be all right, let us not forget that, as Jon Stewart reminded us recently, it wasn’t all that long ago that these same people were all swept away by the Macarena.

Getting back to hope, perhaps you’re wondering just who Vaclav Havel is and what the hell he knows about hope and politics?

Vaclav Havel is a Czech playwright and writer. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel became a vocal critic of the Soviet regime. As a result, he was banned from the theater and imprisoned at various times, his longest stay being four years between 1979 and 1984. He remained politically active at a time and in a place where doing so presented a significant risk to your continued existence on this planet.

The politically inexperienced but passionate and articulate Havel became a leading figure in the Velvet Revolution, the bloodless overthrow of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Havel was elected the 10th and last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the new Czech Republic. After leaving political office in 2003, Vaclav was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.

So the man knows a thing or two about both politics and hope. Havel described Obama’s election as a fresh wind drifting into the Washington air.

So here’s to fresh winds, high hopes and the long, hard road to freedom and equality.

Islander Tom Tyner is an attorney

for the Trust for Public Land. He is author

of “Skeletons From Our Closet,”

a collection of writings on the island’s latte scene.