Urban planning; Buddhist Proverb ("If you can fix it...")

[Jim Parish]

Mullins, Bill wrote:
> Maybe he is misquoting the "Native American" serenity prayer:
>
> Great Spirit, grant me the strength to change what I can, the
> the serenity to accept what I can't change, and the wisdom to
> know the difference.  (and that's a bad quote from memory).

Hmm. There may be a Native American prayer of that sort, but what
you've quoted sounds more like a prayer composed by the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr:
"O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to
change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one
from the other."

According to Niebuhr's biographer June Bingham, this prayer has been
adopted as the motto of Alcoholics Anonymous, distributed to WWII
servicemen by the USO, reprinted by the National Council of Churches,
and used commercially on Christmas cards.

Jim Parish