Truth is hard, but QAnon is easy. And defending truth grows harder still, not only in Ukraine, but also in Lafayette Square, where journalists were gassed, in Ferguson, where they were arrested, in Minneapolis, where police shot one in the eye. This, as some of us wait for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead and Donald Trump to be restored to the White House. All of which makes it difficult to have any sense of remove from Moscow’s war on reality.

There’s a new combativeness that is clearly a reflection of how Donald Trump underlined the power of cultural issues and changed the rules around how you deal with controversy — by doubling down and hitting back harder.

The Endurance crew were explorers and scientists who volunteered for an exciting mission to explore the ice cap at the South Pole. Ukraine’s people never asked to undertake the suffering under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cruel and insane campaign. But as Ukrainians die in the thousands, they show no signs of ending their resistance.

According to Beijing’s propagandists, Siberia belongs to China. The current border (approximately 2,740 miles) is an artifact of the 1860 Convention of Peking. The Second Opium War had weakened China. Czarist Russia was expanding. In 1917, the Bolsheviks acknowledged that czarist treaties forced on China were coercive and predatory. Russia, however, has never returned any Siberian territory.

My Christian faith tells me we are all beloved children of God. My secular experience tells me my publisher was correct. “Some people are just purely evil.” The best we can do is seek a ray of goodness in even the most evil people. Hard to find one in Putin, though.

An appointment to the Planning Board might not seem like a big deal to most folks. How these four councilors went about it should be a wakeup call to all Lewiston citizens to pay close attention to what decisions are made and how our city is being governed.