1. It’s Friday, March 6, 2015. Spring is 15 days away.

2. I tell my news editing class that, by the end of the week, the news cycle gets filled with the sensational, the stuff that is generally unimportant to the fate of civilization. This week, it’s going to be the Harrison Ford plane crash story.

Bottom line: No one, including Mr. Ford, got hurt.

Next.

3. It’s the weekend during which Selma, Ala., will mark the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday voting rights protests.

Gay Telese writes in The New York Times about his latest visit to the city of 28,000. It’s not a reminiscence of the protests — he was there on Bloody Sunday — but more like one of those postscripts you see on the screen after the movie. The Selma he finds seems defined by what happened on those momentous days in 1965.

Things have changed, but the quote that struck me came from current sheriff Harris Huffman. Huffman, who is 61 and white (both, I suppose, need to be noted), said “You’ve got some people in Selma who live in the 1960s, and you’ve got some that live in the 1860s.”

Our whole country is a little like that, I’m afraid. There are some people who are still not ready to accept racial equality — just take a look at the racist “jokes” made by Ferguson officials that are cited in the Justice Department report.

We should still be working to become better. Hopefully, that’s what the Selma weekend will remind us.