Take a deep breath.

OK, now let it out.

The long, arduous bashing that was the… Take a deep breath.

OK, now let it out.

The long, arduous bashing that was the Presidential Election of 2004 is finally over. And if you are sitting in your dorm room thinking that you stood in line for nothing, that after all, your vote didn’t mean a thing, slap yourself.

Your vote did mean something. All of the campaigns to get people out to vote — especially young people — worked. Between P. Diddy’s Vote or Die campaign, MTV’s Choose or Lose: 20 Million Loud and all of the other plans to push for a younger voter turnout, you took to the call and went out and voted.

You stood in lines, some of you for hours on top of hours. When, in your head, you could have listed a million other things you could have been doing for three hours, you stayed and you voted.

CNN reported that 17 percent of the vote came from voters 18-24, the same amount that the election in 2000 garnered. But that statistic means so much more than you think. Even though it is the same percentage as the 2000 election, there were thousands more voters in this election.

Apparently the Vote or Die and Choose or Lose campaigns helped rock the vote this year. But when all of these calls to vote came out to the college students of America, so did calls to Evangelists, NRA members, business owners and many more people who felt that this election was in fact the most important election of our history.

Whether you voted because of the war, health care, social security, taxes or because you wanted someone other than Bush as president, you voted. The voter turnout across the nation was record-breaking.

One thing that will hopefully come from this election is that the old, white men who sit in Congress thinking that college students don’t vote will take a closer look at how they campaign in the future and realize that college students can help a swing state go one way or the other.

In Allegheny County, there were 35,000 new voters registered and 18,000 of them were 18-24 years old. When you look at the breakdown of the way the state of Pennsylvania voted, much of the state did go Republican. What helped it go toward the Democratic Party is the vote that came from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Just walking around the Pitt campus on Election Day, one could tell that there was a spirit for democracy — that people cared. People wore buttons, held signs and honked horns. People cared.

But now that the president is elected, don’t go packing your bags and transferring to a school in Canada just yet. This is a time that young people need to band together and work for any kind of a change that they can. College students are soon to be out in the real world, where voting for a president will certainly mean so much more. Running away isn’t going to help our future.

Look around you. The person sitting next to you may be a Republican to your Democrat, or vice versa. Hell, your roommate may even be your opposite. Learn from these people and find out why America is so divided. Take what you have learned and use that to do what both President Bush and Sen. Kerry stated in their respective speeches on Wednesday: Help America heal.