Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, I am so livid right now about Chuck Schumer literally colluding with nazis by voting for cloture that I'm shaking, but what I really want to talk about is how lucky I have been in my life. I know a lot of us have trouble with awful people we went to high school with, and there are a few I never want to see again, but I have a surprising number of friends from high school that I still talk to frequently and make an effort to see when I'm near them....
4 months ago • 3 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, I keep thinking about how if we ever get out from under this destructive regime I will be so unbothered on a daily basis. I feel like I wasted a lot of years worrying that I wasn't living up to my potential, and just when I started figuring out how to work with my ADHD, the country collapses. All these systems that I thought I wasn't going to be able to navigate correctly because of my ADHD are caving in anyway. And the groups that were supposed to...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, Thank you all for the rubrics! If you forgot to send me one, you still can. I had a great birthday and I have so much hope for the future. This is just a reminder email about tomorrow's economic boycott. Is it going to fix everything? No way. Do we at least have to try? Yes. If we don't all participate as much as we can, how are we ever going to get out from under Musk and the Project 2025 gang? This is all going to conitinue to get worse until...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, A reader told me that Yogi tea turns out to have a very high level of pesticides in their herbal tea blends, and recommended that I switch to Traditional Medicinals. I'm drinking a cup of Traditional Medicinals Immune Zoom Elderberry Echinacea right now, and it's a little cinnamon-forward for me, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. The Traditional Medicinals teabag tag messages are all quotes, not aphorisms, and that's a nice change. I've got "Are...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, This is going to get worse. Chump and Musk are still totally unchecked, and the world is figuring out that the US is no longer trustworthy (if we ever were) and is going to stop associating with us, and things are going to collapse more and more. But eventually we'll get out of this. And that means that we need to preserve the good things about our system and our culture. Artists have to keep making art, musicians need to keep making music,...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, Are any of the rest of you hanging on by the messages on the back of the teabag tag? I drink a lot of herbal tea and Yogi brand has messages on the back of the tags on the teabags with sayings that are always right on the line between inspirational/peaceful and spiritual bypassing. I find that on the days I'm less scared they're comforting, and on the days I'm more scared they're enraging. Which I guess makes them sort of like a mood ring, but in...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, Yesterday the orange menace issued an EO ("Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies") that removes any oversight over the office of the president, and declares that the president is the only authority and interpreter of the law. It invalidates SCOTUS and Congress. Of course this isn't legal, because it's only an EO, but if no one stands up for us and pushes back it goes into effect by default. This is the moment of no turning back. When Trump gets...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, Today has been pretty strange and frustrating for me, and I think for other people, too. Personally, I was gone all weekend and my husband was gone all weekend, and it snowed and then started raining on the snow, and I came home and drove through the slush into the garage, and then he came home and drove through the slush into the garage, and then it froze overnight so now we've got a solid 4-5 inches of hard ice frozen onto the driveway with two...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Magda Pecsenye COMMUNITY CENTER Hi, friends, My pastor Emily Swan* is a historian and one of the smartest people I know, and she introduced me to René Girard's scapegoat theory**. Girard was a philosopher and literary critic, but also a historian, and his work was very much focused on the psychology of desire. He came up with the theory of mimetic desire, which says, essentially, that human beings copy each other, and when one person sees someone else with an object or performing an action,...
5 months ago • 3 min read
