God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference
Mon 2:53 pm +00:00, 26 Oct 2026
Source: https://off-guardian.org/2026/10/26/can-we-be-anything-we-want-to-be/
That is a rather narcissistic question to begin with, isn’t it? If we want to be something, then, according to this statement, we can be that thing, regardless of what it means to anyone else, or what it means to our own obligations to reality.
The woke liberal culture would say yes: we can be anything we want to be. Anything? According to those who say we can, not quite. You cannot be a “toxic” male—or much of a male at all, especially a white one. You cannot be a racist, by their definition. You cannot think women should play traditional roles. You cannot be a Trump supporter, a conservative, or a Christian. No, no, no. According to the “woke liberal culture,” you have no right to hold these identities.
They do, however, believe you can rewrite the body (among other things). You can be a woman even if you have a penis, or a man if you do not. Be a “furry,” a raccoon, a unicorn. Be anything you want to be. And not only can you “be” it; everyone around you has to acknowledge and accept what you say you are. And not only do they have to “acknowledge and accept” what you say you are, they too have to believe it.
Take that trans person for example, who believes they are something they are not because they identify with it. They cannot simply take that claim and live by it, they insist that everyone around them live by it as well. They will go so far as to attempt to change the physical reality that presents them as what they believe to be the wrong gender, by having surgery to remove the obvious culprits. Of course, they cannot change every cell in their body, which is coded for the sex they were born. And again, all of us out here, including the medical practitioners who perform the physical transition, must believe their mental and emotional conviction as well.
To reiterate, the liberal trans concept is that a person does not merely want to be a different sex, but is born in the wrong body. Therefore, they need to adjust reality—the physical sexual biology—in order to conform with what they claim they need. Which is quite different from claiming they just want it.
So what do we say, then, about what it is that we want to be, as opposed to what it is that we are, or what it is that we need to be? I am using the transgender situation here as a clear and obvious example, although what I am saying applies to many other situations, including “presentism,” “cancel culture,” “Trump’s destruction of the world as the most ‘evil man alive’” and on and on, to varying degrees, of course.
Most of the people I am talking about believe that how they see the world is not simply a “belief” but is in fact a “need.” In order for reality to sit with them in a healthy way, it must first be a certain way. They need it to be that way, or else there is no acceptance of it as reality. If it is not the way they need for it to be, they take one of several options:
- They try to manipulate matter to conform to their need (drugs, surgery, in the case of a trans person).
- They try to manipulate everyone around them to acknowledge what they need is reality.
- They become hysterical, claiming that the world is disintegrating around them because it is not conforming to what they need it to be.
What should they do instead? What people have done since the beginning of human history. Believe in the reality presented to them; if they can’t change it through normal means, then accept it. Ah, wait a minute. Isn’t there a famous prayer about this?
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
That’s the short form everyone knows.
The prayer is generally attributed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. A student of his, Winnifred Wygal, wrote a close version into her diary in October 1932 and credited him: the serenity to accept what he cannot help, and the courage to change what must be altered.
She published a fuller wording in 1940, again naming Niebuhr. The prayer then drifted into wider circulation, and Alcoholics Anonymous picked it up in the early 1940s after it turned up in a New York newspaper, which is how it became the household line it is today.
Niebuhr later said he believed he had written it himself. The longer version he is associated with runs a little differently:
“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.”
Same idea. Accept what will not move. Change what will. And know which is which.
But then there is another aspect. There is want, there is need, and there is also belief.
If a person believes that he is Napoleon, or that he is Jesus, is he therefore those things? Does he inhabit that alternate reality simply because he believes he does?
But in reality he isn’t. He isn’t Napoleon, and he isn’t Jesus. We chalk that up to mental illness, to psychosis—a condition in which a person believes something that is not in alignment with reality, whatever reality is.
If he is not Jesus, but believes he is, he is not in alignment with the consensus that Jesus lived two thousand years ago, and that you cannot be something you aren’t.
Modern liberal culture treats identity as a matter of choice or internal feeling. In the case of sex, that becomes the assertion that a person can stake a claim to the other sex despite biological coding in every cell of the body.
Notice the slide. First it is a want: I want to be the other sex. Then it is a need: I need the body altered so it conforms to that inner claim. Then it is a belief: I am the other sex, and the body is what is wrong.
Wanting is a desire. Needing is a demand that the world rearrange itself around the desire. Believing is a claim about what is.
The first two can be argued about. The third is a statement of fact, and a statement of fact is either aligned with reality or it isn’t. Believing one is Napoleon does not make one Napoleon. Believing one is the other sex does not make one the other sex. The body does not negotiate, even when it is mutilated in an effort to conform.
Reality is not a flexible construct dictated by the individual. One cannot be something they are not, regardless of the intensity of the belief or the desire to alter physical presentation.
And the world itself, war, Trump, history, cannot be something it is not, even if a group of people first want it to be, then need it to be, then believe it is the only way it can be.
