Like many Americans of south US extraction, my people have been in this nation a long damned time. I am purportedly descended from the Fullers on the Mayflower, according to my late grandmother Willie Mae Fuller Tanner, but since most people who share the last names of people aboard the Mayflower want to claim them, I can't be sure. My British family certainly came over around the late 1600s - a Scots-Irish servant who was probably dragged to some New World plantation. Thereafter, they arrived in droves - a lot of Scots during the border problems, a lot of Irish during the Belfast rebellion, and a whole lot of English people. I do have a couple of sets of gentry in my genealogy, but nobody is perfect.

Along with all these good and noble unknown people of every strata of life, I have a few luminaria in my family tree of lights, as with most people. I am descended from Alexander Job, a Quaker reformer and friend to William Penn. Ancestral-Grandfather Alexander was born in the middle of the ocean between York, England and the new world. He would become a central figure in the Underground Railroad. He was a person who fought for the rights of the downtrodden and enslaved - who believed people could make a difference without resorting to war. He paid for it with his freedom and his reputation.

I'm also the progeny of a line that includes William Tyndale's sister Margaret. William, of course, helped give to us the book of faith of so many people in this country. Without him, we'd still be slave to ministers interpreting these works for us. He paid for this with his life. He was a force against oppression and censorship and for freedom. Margaret was forced to flee to the Americas, where she would practice her beliefs in the open. Margaret was a force for freedom of beliefs and the right to claim them openly.

I have cousins to include John Adams and James Madison, both men of high principle who risked everything to make a better path for the single individual in a forest of tyranny. Adams, in particular, warned us about the dangers of banks -- the hazards to freedom in the enshrinement of property holders as "Better Citizens". Adams also was avidly anti-slavery and fought to incorporate abolition in the Declaration of Independence. He was, quite often in his life, a lone voice for positive change, defending the weak and vulnerable, and believing in a better vision beyond cynicism.

I am also the immediate descendant of many common laborers, two of whom were a wonderful poet and his wife, a reader and lifelong scholar, who taught me to love language. My grandfather had seen his own stepbrother lose a hand to a machine when his brother was a child. My grandfather believed, and fought for, unions as the voice of the people against corporations that would otherwise oppress individuals in this country. He and my grandmother were forces for knowledge and working for the common good. They encouraged their only daughter to break the Arkansas color barrier to friendships. On Christmas Day, they invited my gay cousin Jimmy and his partner to dine with us. They showed me, through their example, what it means to live an everyday life to the common good.

Beyond them, I come from doctors and lawmen -- Texans and deep southerners -- reclaimed members of the KKK and the people who fought against them. I also draw 1/5th of myself from the Cherokee people of the land, most now lost to history, except for one - my great-aunt Bessie who was half-Irish and half-Cherokee and who loved, with all her soul, the city of New Orleans. She saw in it the hope of the world. She ran a speakeasy there where she openly served all people, no matter their race. She has, in many ways, been a role model for me.

In brief, I come from a long line of good people who meant to do well.

This country is a tapestry much like my own family tree. It is a tapestry meant to protect the rights of the minority, the possibility for people to believe and not believe as they choose, to always reach out to the poor and struggling, and to live for the spirit of open expression and dissent.

This country belongs to the future but it is built upon the past. This country is for the open-minded and the open-hearted...the educated by school or by life alone. This country is for all who come to its shores. It is not only for the rich and the white and heterosexual "Christians" who would claim it now.

Make no mistake - there are plenty of patriots still among us. And we are the children of ages of people who refused to let this country fall to the monsters who would destroy it. The GOP and the NeoCons that have taken over that once proud party should be aware. This is OUR country - not theirs.