Ehlana and Ethan:
Mother Nature isn’t really messing with us, but the drop back to near-freezing overnight felt worse than it was to us; so we’ve spent most of the day indoors. There is no news for our home-school day – other than that we wish we could have been at home and outdoors all day yesterday instead! While the weather wasn’t awful, we still opted for playing at the lab or archives after we finished our online lessons and assignments; and then we came home again for another standard weeknight dinner, work, and study evening with Mom and Dad. None of that would sound exciting to most of our friends, but we’ve still had a fun day – even if that wasn’t as good as our play time yesterday; so we’re happy again tonight as we wrap up our day with the usual bedtime twin chat and this update.
There isn’t any other news from home, but since we keep avoiding commenting on world news; let’s include at least a couple of stories tonight before we wrap this up and Ethan moves on to his room. As the vaccination programs roll out around the world and we’re concerned about whether they’ll help or harm people either in the short or longer term; we also don’t like what is going on with pushes for things like vaccine passports. Sure, we already have a lot of restrictions that aren’t really different from this already, but we’d actually like to have less government intervention for everyone – not more; and we definitely don’t want to see people being punished for personal choices about vaccines or anything else. That is what we’re talking about with these passports – excluding people from being able to work, get food, travel, and more. We can be sure that those restrictions will hurt the poorest people of the world the most; and we still don’t have any idea whether any of the vaccines will have long-term protection or whether we’ll need to deal with Covid the same way we do with the flu or other viruses. Without having more answers to all of the questions that are still out there about both the virus and vaccines; these passports just seem to be more about politics and control than caring about the well-being of people – in our humble, junior Magi Masters’ opinion!
That was a bit of a rant, but we should do the same for our second news topic pick of the night – censorship. We think that most of the ideas being thrown around lately are, to be blunt, insane. What else could it be called when so many people in a country that claims to place high value on individual freedom and democracy demand censorship and ‘canceling’ people simply because of what they say or write because those words either offend you or because you disagree with them? When that happens in other countries, we’ve always at least pretended to be on the ‘right’ side of promoting freedom; yet now it’s okay to silence dissent here at home; virtually or even physically gang up on anyone who dares to disagree with your views; and bully them to the point of destroying their lives or livelihood! How is that any different from the dissenters in other countries being arrested, disappeared, or worse in other countries – other than the fact that it is our fellow citizens and neighbors doing that ‘work’ for the government – or in addition to what they also do to protect their own power from their opponents.
This is getting too-long, so we’ll just point out that censoring and canceling people does not come from a place of love; there is already far too-much hate in the world; and differences will never be resolved by attempting to silence anyone. With that said, we’re going to virtually shut up now; and go get some sleep!
This is Ehlana and Ethan Proctor; live from the hidden home of the Magi of the Light – and May the Magi Force be with you!
