Thompson at Large

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Only a few of the many reasons I'm glad I was born in a country called America...

"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear ... Each singing what belongs to him and to none else ... Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs." — Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing"

"Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits..." — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

"Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done." — Amelia Earhart

"Today, I am an inquisitor....My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the dimunition, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." — Rep. Barbara Jordan, on whether President Nixon had committed impeachable offenses

"This land is your land, this land is my land — from California to the New York Island. From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters: This land was made for you and me." — Woody Guthrie

"It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country on the earth as roughly constituted as I am — a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, prejudices, aversions — can be so happy, or even one half so happy, as he can be in these free and independent states." — H.L. Mencken

" With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." — Second Inaugural Address

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." — Rosa Parks, on refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white male

"Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" — Robert F. Kennedy, after George Bernard Shaw

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it." — Yogi Berra

E-mail Keith

Keith Thompson was born and raised in northwest Ohio community where the most reactionary ideas were framed as conservative. "I gravitated toward the left, which I watched become a community where the most reactionary ideas were framed as progressive," Keith says.

Along the way, Keith worked for a Democratic U.S. Senator, hosted a TV show and had a brief stint as a talk radio host. He lives in northern Califiornia, where he works as an independent journalis, blogger and author. Keith's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications.

For more than two decades, Keith has been a regular features writer for the Pacific Sun, a northern California newsweekly. There he has written pieces about: ludicrous “zero tolerance” school policies that cause the suspension of 6-year-old kids for using their fingers as pretend guns; victim restitution as an overlooked necessary element of criminal justice; the medical marijuana controversy in states whose voters have said yes to medicinal applications; the importance of play in child development and the short-sighted trend of canceling recess in public schools; a 2004 California Supreme Court decision declaring that the well-being of kids must be considered when custodial parents (usually moms) contemplate moving their kids to places far away from the other parent (chiefly dads).

An avid distance runner with a passion for the hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Keith says his most important work is being the father of his eight-year-old son.