The Supreme Court has an opportunity to correct a great legal and greater moral wrong if it will “seize the time” and connect the dots between abortion, the unique value of human life at all stages, and the social upheaval that is consuming us because of the court’s refusal in the last 48 years to restore legal protection to the most vulnerable among us, the unborn child.

You don’t stand facing the back wall of an elevator. In heavy traffic, you take turns merging. You stop at the red light even when the street is deserted. And, oh yes, you don’t join a mob to ransack a store.

The death of composer Stephen Sondheim at 91 is more than the end of an era. It is the end of a chain of great Broadway musicals dating back to the 1920s, when Jerome Kern’s “Showboat” first dazzled theater audiences.

The shoplifting problem represents a deliberate choice rather than an unstoppable tide. Modern societies long ago figured out how to maintain civil order such that law-abiding people could buy and sell goods without being systematically preyed on by thieves. It’s just that the Bay Area has chosen to forget.

Giving is good, and every person who is able to do so, should. But it would be even better to restructure the edifice that produces a need for giving — to realize, as author Celine-Marie Pascale puts it, that what America really needs is not a “seasonal moment of generosity” but “a reckoning for justice.”

Each buyer has an equilibrium point for each purchase. Some willingly pay more, some don’t. At the $5 a pound I paid for my Thanksgiving bird, I was at my equilibrium point. But $5 was way too far to the right of equilibrium for the vast majority of turkey eaters.