THE BELL CURVE:

This isn’t the piece I wrote for this space. I figured if everyone was as tired as I was of this endless campaign then I should share my relief that it was over by exploring a totally unrelated idea, which I did. And then I turned on my TV early Tuesday afternoon, was immersed in it almost to midnight, discarded the piece I had written and joined the celebration.

In those six hours on Tuesday — starting with a tiny town in New Hampshire that sent the first message for President-elect Obama and ending in a lakeside park in Chicago, where 200,000 ecstatic and often tearful witnesses heard our new president reach out to them in spirit — I saw a country, badly in need of unity, reinvent itself.

It would be difficult to imagine how any American could have come away from that day without being touched in deep places that were being hardened by the divisive excesses of the campaign.

So Tuesday, many millions of Americans of every age, sex and skin color took it upon themselves to say “enough,” then stand in long lines to cast votes that put a stamp on their determination to create a truly participatory democracy.

So powerful were the events of those six hours that they pushed the campaign into shadows that finally disappeared altogether in the light of the new awareness of involvement and unity.

I’ve sweated out election returns and been moved by inspired acceptance speeches over eight decades, but I’ve never experienced an election night nor heard one that touched the depths of the American soul as this one did. Not even Franklin Roosevelt. Not even John Kennedy.

It built slowly and steadily during the day. The first hours were devoted to election returns starting with the eastern states and moving across the country.

The returns were interspersed with pictures of thousands of voters waiting patiently in lines that sometimes took three hours to cast their ballots — astonishing sights in a country where 50% election turnouts had become more the rule than the exception.

But on this Tuesday, the indifference turned to excitement and determination to have a part in the process. And the satisfaction of seeing it happen in vignettes across the country while watching the numbers was exhilarating. And astonishing.

By 6 p.m. the trend was clear, and a couple of hours later Sen. John McCain emerged from his home in Arizona to make his concession speech. His last one. And his best.

His finest hour was warm and generous and conciliatory and deeply worthy of the respect due a vanquished foe.

And it left me with a great sense of gratitude for having had the good fortune to be born into a country where power could change hands in peace and reasonable goodwill. And where injustice is eventually addressed as so spectacularly demonstrated by the man we had just elected to lead our country.

He caught this so powerfully when he told a throng along Chicago’s lakefront Wednesday night — in a message that must have offered reassurance all over the world — that “tonight because of what we did on this day and in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

There were only two downsides to my Tuesday. My gay stepson, Erik, ran into a group in Los Angeles carrying placards urging a “No” vote on Proposition 8.

He joined them impulsively, and spent his next six hours on this election day making a personal statement of principle in what turned out to be a losing cause. Maybe the same sense of fairness and justice that carried Barack Obama to the White House will hasten that process for our gay citizens.

Maybe it will also get through to the citizens of Orange County who sat out this election. According to the Orange County Registrar of Voters, 55% of the county’s registered voters cast ballots in this election, well below the national average of 64%, the highest voter turnout in 40 years.

But to end on a high note, perhaps we can now welcome new generations of young people and immigrant citizens to an active role in our society.

Let us hope they’ve arrived to stay. And to vote. And to help us break down barriers to justice and fairness in a country which has just demonstrated it is ready to adopt the same goals.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.