I believe that the COVID vaccine is a positive development, and I also believe that people should be able to choose what they put in their bodies. I also am stunned at the speed at which frontline workers went from COVID-fighting heroes to people worthy of attack simply because they don’t want to take the COVID vaccine.

It is foolish to believe an intense war involving China and the U.S. would be confined to the Taiwan Strait and end with Taiwan’s loss. In the scenario, missiles hit regional U.S. bases — meaning Japan, South Korea, Guam, perhaps Australia, Singapore and Hawaii.

Once we celebrated and encouraged success. Now we subsidize mediocrity and failure. We are then surprised we are getting more of the latter and less of the former. Do your homework. Don’t be manipulated by the language used by politicians and TV ads promising free stuff.

Anyone on social media, or a simple email account, can be subjected to bullying and cruel comments, many of them anonymously sent by cowards. Women are favored targets for crude remarks.

That’s a simple given of the digital age. Teenage girls would be advised to reassess what apps they use. Meanwhile, all sensitive women who insist on living online must toughen up. Adolescence would be the right place to start.

I’m not arguing against disruption or even against breaking things. And certainly not against moving fast. I’m a basketball fan, after all. But I believe the pace of disruption may have risen up so much that we can’t keep up with it. As our heads spin, we may grab for answers that wouldn’t make a lick of sense if things moved slower. And broke up less.

The police are esteemed — rightly — for being first responders, for running toward danger. But that is not, and cannot be, a get-out-of-accountability-free card. We’d demand answers from the janitor or short-order cook who behaved as if rules were for other people. Why is it so hard to hold to the same standard men and women in whom we vest such sweeping authority?

The New York Times ran a report the other day on the canceling of University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot for his dissenting views on affirmative action. The paper quoted a Williams College geosciences professor, Phoebe A. Cohen, who supports Abbot’s shunning. She explained her dim view of academic freedom thusly, “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”