Where in the World is Josie Tomkow?
Or The Ghost of Polk City and the Great Tampa Gamble South Tampa and Downtown are built on a foundation
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Places
If it has to do with a geographical location, I will categorize it with this category.
Wisdom: The Organizing Virtue
What happens when leadership confuses force with wisdom?
Learn a 3-step pause to outthink panic and regain control over decision-making. We are living in a moment when reactivity often masquerades as strength. Foreign policy escalates without proportion. Economic decisions shift with the winds of applause. Dissent is treated as disloyalty. But courage without wisdom becomes recklessness. Justice without wisdom becomes punishment. Temperance without wisdom becomes denial. Something essential is missing when judgment fails at scale.
In this new essay, I reflect on what Stoic wisdom actually looks like — not as abstraction, but as disciplined judgment under pressure. From sleepless nights of personal uncertainty to watching national decisions unfold, I explore why wisdom is the organizing virtue that keeps both a life and a nation from unraveling.
Read more in Wisdom: The Organizing Virtue.
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Looking Back at 2025: A Year of Loss, Resolve, and Reckoning
At 66, I did not expect 2025 to take as much as it did. My mother died. I lost my job. Certain illusions about stability quietly disappeared. It was not a year of fireworks or easy victories. It was a year of subtraction. And yet, beneath the loss, something steadier emerged: clarity. About health. About purpose. About what still matters when titles and timelines fall away.
If 2025 was the year of endurance, 2026 must be the year of intention. Fewer illusions. More intention. The road continues. In this year-end reflection, I write honestly about grief, layoffs, aging, civic resolve, and the discipline of choosing steadiness anyway. I hope you’ll read the full piece and walk a little of that road with me.
The Ideological Tourist: Why Josie Tomkow is the Wrong Prescription for Tampa
Josie Tomkow is a career politician currently engaged in an audacious act of “ideological tourism.” Having spent years in rural Polk County, she is now attempting to transplant her record of institutionalized cruelty into the heart of South Tampa and Downtown. As the Chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee, she hasn’t just been a witness to the state’s “campaign of terror” against marginalized communities—she has been its gatekeeper. From overseeing draconian abortion bans to weaponizing healthcare against the LGBTQ+ community, Tomkow has treated the law as a tool for “othering” rather than a safeguard for the public.
For a district that serves as the engine of Florida’s medical and research sector, Tomkow’s record is a fundamental mismatch. While Tampa’s doctors and researchers rely on scientific consensus, Tomkow has been the primary legislative enabler for a reckless anti-science agenda that threatens our schools and retirees. She is a “carpetbagger” who views our community as a political fallback, yet she brings with her a “patrimonial” system that prioritizes extremist loyalty over the actual health of our citizens. It is time to tell this opportunist that Tampa’s values—and our healthcare—are not for sale.
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Civic Duty as Lived Responsibility
Where will someone sleep in your city tonight? Civic duty rarely announces itself. It does not arrive as a moment of clarity or a flood of inspiration. More often, it looks like routine. Mats laid out across a facility space. Meals delivered and set out. Volunteers arriving in shifts through the night so others can sleep indoors when the temperature drops.
We talk about civic duty as an idea, but it is better understood as a practice. It begins when concern becomes action. Not because the work feels noble, but because shared life demands it. When a community faces need, and some people have the capacity to respond, responsibility follows. Not as heroism. As participation.
This essay reflects on civic duty as lived responsibility. Drawing on Stoic philosophy, Wesleyan theology, and a wider moral consensus across traditions, it asks what it really means to show up for others when the work is repetitive, incomplete, and often unseen.
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Steel-Toed Integrity
When something breaks in the real world, you don’t call a politician to give a speech; you call someone with a toolbox to fix it. That is the leadership Brian Nathan offers Senate District 14. A Navy veteran and IBEW electrician who chose Tampa as his home during the Great Recession, Brian brings a craftsman’s perspective to a political system that is deeply broken.
Read about Brian’s vision for “steel-toed integrity”—a philosophy born on the job site that prioritizes practical solutions for working families over political theater. He is running to fight for affordable housing, good-paying local jobs, and quality education.
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The High Price of “Nice”: What Karen Gonzalez Pittman is Actually Costing South Tampa
Is your State Rep costing you money?
On paper, Representative Karen Gonzalez Pittman fits South Tampa perfectly. She’s polished, presentable, and active in the community. If you met her at a Palma Ceia mixer, you’d think, “Now, there’s a reasonable person.” But for the wealthy and aspirational residents of District 65, voting for Pittman has become an expensive illusion. You think you’re voting for stability, but you’re actually paying a premium for a representative who consistently prioritizes Tallahassee’s culture war performance art over your bank account.
The most glaring receipt is your property insurance bill. For years, the Republican supermajority, of which Pittman is a loyal member, has promised that if we protected insurance companies from lawsuits, rates would trickle down. Pittman voted for every one of those protections. Yet, while your premiums have doubled, she and her colleagues have spent the legislative session banning books and policing bathrooms rather than fixing the financial crisis that is actually threatening our property values.
There’s a high cost to the “anti-woke” agenda, and South Tampa homeowners are paying it. This is a clear example of Patrimonialism: the state is run for insiders, while regular people get worse service and pay more. It’s time to see what her “nice” image is really costing you.
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Stoic Practices: Negative Visualization
What if imagining loss could make life feel fuller, not darker? The Stoics called it premeditatio malorum—the quiet practice of picturing what could go wrong, not to suffer in advance, but to steady the heart for when it does.
In this new essay, I write about sitting beside my mother near the end of her life, and later facing my own health scare. Both moments taught me that rehearsing misfortune isn’t about fear. It’s about gratitude. The kind that comes from realizing how much you already have.
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Stoic Practices: Contemplation of Nature
Stoicism teaches that nature is both teacher and law. In a time of rising seas and stronger storms, the lesson feels urgent: to live according to nature now means to remember that we are not outside it.
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Rehearsing Virtue in Small Daily Acts
At The Portico café in downtown Tampa, I paused my work to sit with a man who had just been released from prison. He was unsure what to do next. I offered coffee, listened, and waited until the manager returned to connect him with help. It wasn’t a big deal, but later, I realized how much peace there can be in simply giving someone attention for a few minutes.
In the past, I invited my widowed neighbor to join my husband and me for our usual Taco Tuesday after she told me her daughter had been declared cancer-free. She later said how much the evening meant to her. Those simple moments, one with a stranger, one with a friend, reminded me that compassion is a practice. The Stoics taught that virtue is built not in theory but in repetition, through the small choices that make us steady and kind.
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Living the Last Best Moment
Greta Gerwig once said, “You don’t know when the last time of something happening is. You don’t know what the last great day you’ll spend with your best friend is. You’ll just know when you’ve never had that day again.” That line has echoed in me ever since I first heard it. It captures both the sweetness and fragility of the present moment.
The Stoics knew this well. Marcus Aurelius warned against drifting into tomorrow, reminding himself that life is lived only in the day at hand. Seneca told us that we waste time as if it were endless. For them, attention to the present was not a poetic thought. It was survival. It was also the way to live a life worth remembering.
I think of an afternoon long ago with my friend Jim, shooting pool at his parents’ house. Or a fall day on a golf course with my friend Mike, pausing to look over Moss Lake together. Neither seemed extraordinary at the time. Yet they have stayed with me as “last great days.” The lesson is clear: if I want to live fully, I must live here, in this moment, as if it could be the last best one.