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Is Karen Gonzalez-Pittman Representing South Tampa or Tallahassee?

June 29, 2026 B. John 124 Views 0 Comments Karen Gonzalez Pittman, Home Rule, local control, Tallahassee preemption, housing policy, infill redevelopment, school boards, wage recovery, South Tampa

This entry is in the series 2026 Elections

Karen Gonzalez-Pittman represents South Tampa, but her voting record raises a fair question: is she representing this community, or carrying Tallahassee’s agenda back home? Again and again, she has voted for bills that take decision-making power away from local governments, local school boards, and local voters.

From housing and tenant protections to infill redevelopment, school policy, civilian oversight, and local employment standards, Gonzalez-Pittman has sided with state preemption over home rule. For South Tampa, where traffic, flooding, housing pressure, schools, and neighborhood character are intensely local concerns, that record deserves much closer scrutiny.

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Josie Tomkow’s Record Shows Tallahassee Comes First

June 26, 2026June 26, 2026 B. John 164 Views 0 Comments local control, Tallahassee preemption, Public Schools, South Tampa, Senate District 14, Hillsborough County, Josie Tomkow, Brian Nathan, Home Rule

This entry is in the series 2026 Elections

This entry is in the series Florida Legislature

Florida Republicans love to talk about freedom, but their voting records often tell a very different story. Over and over again, Tallahassee politicians have voted to take decision-making power away from local communities, local governments, and local school boards. Josie Tomkow’s record in the Florida House is a clear example.

Tomkow is now running again against Brian Nathan in Senate District 14, asking Tampa-area voters to send her back to Tallahassee. But when she served in the House representing Polk County, she repeatedly voted for state preemption over local control, including on housing, zoning, infill redevelopment, civilian oversight, and public schools.

That matters here. Tampa and Hillsborough County deserve representation rooted in this community, not another vote for Tallahassee control. The question for voters is simple: if Tomkow voted this way in the House, why should anyone expect her to vote differently in the Senate?

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Tallahassee Keeps Telling Local Communities to Sit Down

June 23, 2026 B. John 194 Views 1 Comment Home Rule, Preemption, local democracy, Hillsborough County, worker protections, Florida Legislature, heat safety, Tallahassee, zoning

This entry is in the series Florida Legislature

This entry is in the series 2026 Elections

There is a word in Florida politics that sounds dry enough to cure insomnia but is quietly reshaping life in our communities: preemption.

Preemption is what happens when Tallahassee tells local governments they are not allowed to solve local problems. In recent years, the Legislature has used it to block local worker protections, weaken local control over zoning and development, and shift more decisions away from the people who actually live with the consequences.

My latest article examines this growing pattern, including Florida’s ban on local heat protections for outdoor workers, recent development bills that override local planning, and the legislators who keep voting to shift power away from communities and into the state’s hands. This is not just a procedural fight. It is about whether local democracy still means anything when powerful interests want it out of the way.

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The Decision Was Mine-The Outcome Was Not

June 18, 2026 B. John 180 Views 1 Comment uncertainty, job loss, self-respect, Stoicism, Resilience, Dichotomy of Control, wisdom, regret, decision-making

This entry is in the series Journey Through Stoicism

Lately, life has been asking for more decisions than usual. Not small ones, but the kind that seem to carry a future inside them. Work. Money. Health insurance. A parent’s care. A funeral. An estate. What to keep. What to let go. What to protect. What to release. In this season, I have learned that decision-making is not only a matter of logic. It also carries emotional weight, especially when the outcome remains uncertain.

In this essay, I reflect on a difficult job-search decision that still brings occasional regret, and how Stoic philosophy helps me think about it more clearly. The Stoics remind us that we can control the care, judgment, and integrity we bring to a decision. We cannot control the outcome. That distinction does not eliminate uncertainty, but it does offer a kind of mercy. Sometimes the best we can do is choose honestly from the place where we stand, then release what was never fully ours to command.

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What We Choose Together

June 12, 2026June 12, 2026 B. John 380 Views 0 Comments Stoicism, government, justice, Civic Engagement, common good, Faith250, Citizenship, The New Colossus, public life

This entry is in the series Journey Through Stoicism

Politics can make otherwise reasonable people turn strange. It can harden conversations, flatten human beings into talking points, and tempt us into anger, contempt, or despair. But avoiding public life entirely is also a moral choice. If government is, as Barney Frank once said, “the things we choose to do together,” then citizenship is one of the places where our values become visible.

This essay reflects on a recent Citizen Engagement training at Hyde Park United Methodist, the beginning of the Faith250 series, and Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” as a way into a larger question: what does a Stoic owe to public life? The answer is not withdrawal. It is disciplined participation, rooted in justice, guided by wisdom, restrained by temperance, and sustained by courage.

The Stoic citizen does not control the whole outcome. But we can still show up with clarity. We can still speak truth without surrendering to hatred. We can still widen the circle, lift a lamp, and choose together as wisely and justly as we can.

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When Principle Gets Called Partisan

June 11, 2026June 12, 2026 B. John 230 Views 0 Comments Democracy, confirmation bias, public discourse, moral principles, Civic Engagement, civic responsibility, partisanship, political bias, motivated reasoning

After a civic engagement event I helped organize, a woman approached me with a question that stayed with me. She wondered what a similar event held by “the other side” might look like. Would they just sit around saying ugly things about “us”? When I explained that our event was designed to be nonpartisan, focused only on helping people engage with public officials on whatever issue mattered to them, she looked at me and said, “Well, I’m here to tell you this was definitely partisan.”

That moment got me thinking about the difference between being partisan and being principled. We often call something partisan because it actually promotes a party, candidate, or ideology. But sometimes we use the word because something made us uncomfortable, challenged our assumptions, or touched a moral concern we have already sorted into a political box.

This essay explores how bias shapes what we hear, why two people can sit in the same room and experience almost different events, and why civic responsibility itself has started to feel suspicious in our divided culture. Democracy cannot survive if every effort to help people use their voice gets treated as a political threat.

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The Tuition of Regret

June 2, 2026 B. John 217 Views 0 Comments Friendship, Stoicism, Resilience, Reflection, personal growth, wisdom, regret, last great days, Memento Mori

This entry is in the series Journey Through Stoicism

Most of us have regrets, whether we admit them or not. A word spoken too sharply. A kindness withheld. A friendship allowed to drift. A warning sign ignored until it was too late. We may like the idea of living with “no regrets,” but that has always struck me as too clean. If we have lived fully, loved deeply, failed honestly, or hurt someone along the way, regret eventually finds us.

In this essay, I explore regret through the lens of Stoicism, Daniel Pink’s work on The Power of Regret, and my own recent life. I have come to think of regret as life’s tuition. Nobody wants to pay it. Sometimes it is painfully expensive. But if we refuse to learn the lesson, we pay the tuition and never receive the education.

The Stoics did not ask us to deny regret or drown in it. They asked us to examine it, learn from it, make amends where we can, and then lay it down. Regret is not meant to become a permanent home. It is a classroom. The lesson may be to call the friend, offer the apology, act sooner, speak more gently, or create new great days while we still can.