It is said that alcoholics often need to “hit bottom” before they will make the necessary changes to kick their craving. The crisis in Ukraine has made us hit bottom on our addiction to oil. It is best for humanity’s survival, and the planet’s, that we kick it now.

The woman at the post office worries there are insufficient numbers among the young and even millennials to guarantee our freedoms will be extended. Sadly, she may be right.

Maine’s asylum seekers and other immigrants have also fled violence and threats to their families’ safety and well-being. Just as we want to support those fleeing Ukraine, we can take actions to support those building new lives here. That includes ensuring they have access to housing, health care and other basic needs.

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.