Note: On April 14th, 1775, five days before the Battle of Lexington, Thomas Paine joined others in forming the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, America’s first abolitionist group.

I wanted to wish everyone reading my blog and following my work as happy and peaceful a Fourth Of July is possible.

I am thinking today of all the American families who are having a hard year in many different ways.

It is a different kind of Fourth of July than I imagined, but for me, it marks the beginning of the long but inevitable slog to make our country kinder and more compassionate again.

The faces of Mt. Rushmore do not stir me much, but the writings of Tom Paine do. He was a political radical who sparked the American Revolution and saw it as a challenge to tyranny anywhere in the world.

Nobody needs any patriotic platitudes from me.

I love this country, I love the life it has offered me, my friends and my family. I understand the challenge is to offer that live to everyone here and everyone who wishes to come here to escape persecution.

My family and I would not be alive if not for America and the golden lamp. It is no crime in America to be a political radical.

For those not here legally, I pray for compassion, not persecution. I don’t want this to be a political message, but a personal one.

Thomas Paine, one of my most tortured and complex American heroes wrote that “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

I agree. Everyone is free to disagree with me, no one has the right to argue my beliefs with me. That is right given to the civil and those who believe in freedom.

I hold my beliefs to be sacred to me, and I won’t offer them up or sacrifice them to anyone who can’t listen or hear.

Paine has long been my inspiration, as a citizen, and as a writer, and on the Fourth of July, I think of my favorite quote from this poorly educated corset-maker from England whose words inspired a country to try to be free.

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

Me too. I wish you peace and compassion.

Black Lives Matter.

“Our traders in men must know the wickedness of that slave trade if they attend to reasoning or the dictates of their own hearts. But they shun and stifle all these and willfully sacrifice conscience and the character of integrity to that golden idol…”

— Thomas Paine, April, 1775.