Ethan and Ehlana:
Happy 22nd Birthday, Karla Benton!
We only mention Karla’s birthday because Cassie and Rowen recruited us to deliver her gift today; so we fit that in with our after-school play time with our friends.
Our adventures today included a slightly-warmer Tai Chi by the river; another fun blast of academic entertainment at school; biking, swimming, and that gift delivery and a snack break at the Galleria; and dinner-for-six with Mom, Dad, Naomi, and Aiden. Our best friends stayed for another music practice and Magi lesson; we walked them home and took Silkie along for the exercise; and we’ve most-recently finished up with bath or Jacuzzi time because we needed to get clean after our busy day.
While getting some sleep is up next on our to-do lists; let’s cover a bit of news from around the world. We don’t really even talk about worldly events with our friends very often, and don’t write about it here in our personal journals, but we do keep up with a lot of news from more places than most kids our age could even name; and fewer could accurately evaluate the information that is available. Ehlana and I really don’t want to get into a long commentary or analysis; so let’s just cover a few of the recent top stories.
For this week, the top political story is Queen Elizabeth’s passing late last week and the events that will lead up to her funeral next week. We’re young, so this really doesn’t affect us personally, but she was also the only monarch from the United Kingdom that most people have ever known; one of the most-famous people in the world; and the transition of ‘power’ to her son, King Charles, will be a first for most of us too; since the Queen reigned for seventy years. We don’t want to get into any of the politics surrounding monarchies or the awful things that are being said and written about the royal family – we’ll simply suggest that every type of government and the people that are in positions of power have often-unsavory histories.
Moving along, the war in Ukraine is escalating – particularly with counter-offensives from the Ukraine side; and nobody is seriously negotiating for an end to the fighting. The leaders that want the war to go on endlessly are happy; while the fighters and civilians in the area are living – or dying – with the horrific costs of such colossal stupidity. War seems to be a trend heading into the fall. There is fighting or tensions between several sets of European countries; tensions are still high around Taiwan; the middle east is still a mess; and the only rarity seems to be politicians with any sense at all or interest in what might be best for their own citizens.
Finally, we are definitely seeing wide-spread problems due to global inflation as people either can’t afford or can’t get food and energy. Some of those problems are directly related to the wars – especially the sanctions and economic warfare, and has we head into winter, if something isn’t done about these problems; the general public retaliation could get very ugly – and we can only pray and hope that the human costs won’t be a worse-tragedy than the pandemic.
After all of that, you can see why we don’t want to go down this news rabbit hole very often – and we haven’t even scratched the surface of all of the bad around the world. That is more than enough for this update, though, and we’re going to move on to some music videos or something to get us to a happier place before we crash into nap-mode for the rest of the night.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
