Opinion

Sunday’s Solano Stroll was a typically festive Berkeley event. It started out cold and windy, but eventually the fog burned off and citizens came out to stroll in more than respectable numbers. The Planet was lucky—because we’d contributed space to the S olano merchants’ association for advertising the event, we got space across from Andronico’s to set up a table and chairs with a sunshade, where we could sit with our grandchildren and enjoy the passing throng. -more-

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only three years since Saudi Muslim extremists commandeered commercial aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What was before September 11, 2001, a small fire fanned by a few fanatics has become a firestorm which threatens to engulf the world. The historic willingness of human beings to kill and be killed for a religious ideology has been demonstrated again and again since 9/11, most recently in the appalling occurrences in North Ossetia, now part of Russia, where men and (most tragically) women were willing to kill defenseless children who had done nothing to harm them, in support of an abstraction which is essentially meaningless to non-believers. -more-