There is a lesson here that police ignore at their own peril. For all the tools at law enforcement’s disposal — guns, Tasers, badges and batons — one of its most important and effective is simply credibility, worthiness of trust. Unfortunately, police have squandered that commodity.

The guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on all counts was correct, based on the evidence, but the theatrics leading up to that trial and after the jurors had made their decision was outrageous.

Science is the accumulation of our best knowledge at the moment, the result of testing and retesting ideas. This seems to have been hard for some people to grasp, both those who use science to guide our response to COVID-19 and those who deny the developing science or even deny that the virus exists.

The legislation would fundamentally overhaul our country’s labor laws with potentially catastrophic consequences that would infringe on employees’ privacy rights, force small businesses to close permanently and lead to significant job loss.

Russia and China are conducting multiple probing operations intended to test President Biden’s administration as a whole and, to be frank, directly target Joe Biden as the septuagenarian human being who ostensibly leads what China’s communist propagandists ritually deride as the U.S.-led “Liberal International Order” but recently scorned as “U.S.-led anti-China cliques.”

In a nation that was not broken along seams of race, a nation where you could trust the police to actually protect and serve no matter the color of your skin, Chauvin’s conviction would have been a foregone conclusion. But in this nation, it was anything but. That’s why I forgot to breathe. And why, after the verdict, what I felt was less exultation than simply relief.

We live in a violent culture that does not honor the sacredness of human life. From abortion to shootings in the streets of our major cities, life has become cheap and easily disposable.

Corporations that defend the democracy are seeing to their own interests. But they may save us all.

The state must find ways to boost recycling. Our leaders can start by assigning the producers of plastic, glass, and other packaging responsibility for funding and maintaining a new recycling infrastructure that would enable Maine to process its waste independently.

If you don’t want anguish translating into violence, translate it into change.