About Us |
OUR TEAM: JERRY, MATT, CHRIS....AND YOU THE PEOPLE See Be an Activist and Contact us for ways you can join the team Editor, Founder, and Publisher.
Jerry Rose For more on Jerry, see Editors Page: Meet the Editor. Email: jerry@sunstateactivist.org Webmaster - Assistant Editor
Matthew Parker Matt was born in Cleveland, Ohio and migrated to Florida in 1999. He is currently a student and is editor of the popular political web site PoliticalBuzz.com Email: matt@sunstateactivist.org Technical Advisor
Chris Knack Chris was born and raised in Alachua county. He works for Conceptual Arts, Inc. and is currently attending SFCC.
AN INVOCATION FOR THE (NOT NECESSARILY) RELIGIOUS Our Serenity Prayer The spirit in which this webiste is undertaken is the famous “serenity prayer” authored by the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (and adapted by Alcoholics Anonymous): “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Since progressives are by nature devoted to change, it would seem that courage would be the greatest requisite for our enterprise, since our change efforts will be opposed both by the regressive forces of special interests in maintaining the status quo---but also by the dominance of the serene among us (otherwise known as the fatalistic) who have “accepted” the world as it is because they have no believable “vision” of what the world could be. ..and “where there is no vision, the people perish.” With a combination of the fatalist and the regressive in the political saddle, we may be populist in our views but we cannot expect to be especially popular with much of the public and we truly must have the courage of our convictions in the face of such peer pressures. A website of, by and for progressives should aim to promote some of that courage by enhanced association with like-minded people: the “choir” to whom we are so often criticized for preaching needs the re-enforcement of their own kind if they are to sing full-throatedly to the public at large. This is one aspect of “empowerment.” Having given courage its due, the website must speak as well to serenity and wisdom. Courage without wisdom can be fool-hardiness, and we progressives often border on that state. Politics, as is often said, is the “art of the possible,” and, if we are to have any possibility of an effect on politics, we must have the wisdom to distinguish the possible from the impossible, and to make some of those compromises without which our change efforts are likely to be much “sound and fury but signifying nothing” in terms of bringing about any of the changes we seek. If the full-throated choir that we hope to develop sings only for itself, has it in fact ever sung? The issue here is not really one of “framing” our positions to make them appeal to the general public. The issue is whether our reform efforts are based on full information and dispassionate analysis of the full dimensions of the problems for which we are seeking solutions. A progressive website must, and this one will, provide the reader with resources of the most realistic and complete information and analysis on the issues of our interest. Only then can we begin to “distinguish” between those things that “should be changed” and to which we should harness our courage, and those things which we must accept with a degree of serenity. And a final word about this matter of serenity. Our wisdom as progressives should not lead us invariably to an either/or judgment in distinguishing between the tractable and the intractable. Another word for serenity is patience and note that this is not exactly the same as total acceptance of a current situation. Roman wasn’t built in a day and the Empire of selfishness, greed and indifference against which we contend will not be dismantled in a single apocalyptic stroke. As progressives we must recognize the “incremental” nature of most enduring social change, and encourage and acknowledge the “little victories” achieved by our comrades with the “good news” of such victories that should pervade the pages of a progressive website. Centuries ago Lao-Tzu put it thus: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” and John F. Kennedy introduced his presidency in 1961 by outlining an agenda of change and then saying: “All this will not be finished in the first hundred days, nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in the lifetime of this planet. But let us begin.” With the serenity of realization that “this is going to take awhile” and the courage to take those incremental steps in the face of our detractors along the trail, we may indeed hope to have some progressive impact during the “lifetime of this planet.”
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