America changed, all right. Prodded by the stark racial fears of the political right, our politics became first shrill, then incoherent, then, one year ago this month, violent. They also became more exclusionary. Emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling that tore the heart from the Voting Rights Act, the right passed new Jim Crow laws designed to make voting more difficult for people of color.

The president went to Atlanta last week, where he made claims that would have sent a lie detector off the chart. With a tableau of mostly Black people behind him, Biden again asserted without credible evidence that Republicans are trying to stop minorities from voting. That this is probably false on many levels does not deter Biden, other Democrats, or fundraisers from making the claim because in addition to lying, they are also confirming their belief that too many voters accept whatever they are told from political leaders, especially Democrats.

King saw the grinding poverty facing Black people at home as inseparable from the war overseas. As he noted, “If our nation can spend 35 billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”

The civil rights leader’s name is the conservative rebuttal to concerns about systemic racism. King’s name is a love song for bootstrapping individualists. It’s akin to a glide path to a safe landing for anyone accused of trying to elevate themselves by diminishing others.

CMP’s unreliability and poor response to its all too frequent outages, its hopeless billing system, its terrible customer service, and its plodding approach to solar deployment are all enormously frustrating. Whether they constitute sufficient cause for unwinding the company’s exclusive franchise may be debatable. However, its totally predictable and insufficient response to the challenge of beneficial electrification constitutes far more than adequate cause to replace its monopoly. It’s a necessity.

When Martin Luther King stood at the temple of Lincoln in 1963 and declared his dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he surely spoke a word for the ages.

New York was once known as “Fun City.” It is rapidly becoming gloomy and, as it was in the 1970s, an increasingly dangerous place to visit and live.

The vaccinated majority is rapidly losing interest in the fate of the unvaccinated — and that’s putting it diplomatically. The latter may be irresponsible, ignorant, selfish, mentally unbalanced or any combination of the above. We just feel sorry for the innocents around them.