Opinion

Looking across the bay from Berkeley to the drama around District Attorney Kamala Harris’s decision not to seek the death penalty for the young tough accused of killing an undercover San Francisco police officer, I am struck by how much times have changed, and at the same time how much things remain the same. A central argument of the early suffragists was that when women had the vote and were elected to public office their decisions would be more humane and thoughtful. From my perspective, Kamala Harris seems to embody that image of the woman as leader: humane, because she recognizes that nothing would be gained by executing a young person who seems to have acted without premeditation, using a weapon he should never have been able to buy, against a challenger that he may not even have known was a police officer; thoughtful, because seeking the death penalty would be an expensive and pointless symbolic gesture, since San Francisco (as well as Alameda County) juries almost never vote for death sentences. -more-

The ancient Greeks told stories about the history of the world as they knew it which are still a useful way to predict what will happen to humans in the modern world. Hercules, half man and half god, was one of the central figures in Greek mythology. Like Superman in the 20th century, he dedicated his career to stamping out evil wherever he found it. One of the labors, or heroic tasks, of Hercules was killing the legendary Hydra. -more-