Letters: John Beam’s real gift was teaching accountability

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Beam’s real gift was
teaching accountability

Re: “Family and protégés pay respects to slain coach” (Page B1, Dec. 7).

Coach John Beam changed my life when I was a 14-year-old kid on the Skyline High football field. I still remember getting flattened in a varsity drill and looking up to see Beam standing over me, demanding more because he saw more. That was his gift. He coached football, but he taught manhood: accountability, discipline, belief in yourself long before you earned it.

Beam fought for me in the classroom, pushed me on the field and helped me get to college when the odds weren’t in my favor. He shaped generations of young men in Oakland with the same mix of toughness and love.

With his passing, the East Bay didn’t just lose a coach — we lost a mentor, a guide and a true example of what leadership looks like. His legacy lives in the thousands he lifted along the way.

One time for John Beam.

Rod Campbell
Oakland

Wind turbines pose
major threat to rare birds

Re: “Bird statistics paint a skewed picture” (Page A6, Dec. 9).

Sydney Stull defends wind turbines despite the avian casualties. He is correct in pointing out that one statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, but suggests many more birds are killed by buildings. Might this have to do with the fact that there are more than 100 million buildings in the United States and fewer than 100,000 wind turbines?

The real issue with wind turbines is not the number of birds killed — it’s the type of bird. Wind turbines tend to kill large and rare species, raptors in particular. So if you care about the California Golden Eagle, for example, the wind turbine numbers count.

Malcolm Hoar
Fremont

Stop Krusi Park from
going to the dogs

The unsanctioned dog park at Krusi Park in Alameda needs to stop. Multiple times a week, dog owners gather and take their dogs off-leash at Krusi Park, in direct violation of the posted ordinance requiring dogs to be leashed at all times. Whether the dogs are well-behaved is not the point. Even the most well-behaved dogs can be unpredictable at times. Otis School is adjacent to the park. Students use the park before, during and after school. What if a child is frightened? Or worse?

The rules are there for a reason. Just because you think you have control over your pet does not give you license to break the rules. Respect your neighbors and your community and follow the rules. If you want to take your dog off-leash, there are places to do that. Krusi Park is not that place.

Chris Carling
Alameda

‘Unitary Executive’ is
founders’ greatest fear

“Conservative” justices on the Supreme Court have adopted an entirely new theory of presidential power. They call it the “Unitary Executive,” which seems to suggest the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants.

Isn’t that the absolute power in the hands of absolute leaders that the founders feared?

Michael Steinberg
Berkeley

Growth of bureaucracies
is reason to protect them

Re: “Trump’s power to fire likely to be expanded” (Page A1, Dec. 9).

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that members of independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission have extensive power over individuals and industries, with no accountability. True, but these agencies don’t exist to follow or implement the policies of the current administration; they were intended to be nonpartisan, nonpolitical experts, to advise government and the public in their areas of expertise. Any policies they develop must be approved by the administration before they can be put in place. So why make them accountable to the most politicized person in government: the president?

Conservative justices also pointed out that these agencies are much more powerful than decades ago when the precedent was established that the president could not fire members arbitrarily. But if the law protected them when the agencies were small, how can it not protect them now? The law can’t apply to small agencies but not to large ones.

Merlin Dorfman
Livermore

Trump aims to be
above all laws

Reuters reports that a Trump administration official recently revealed that the administration is threatening the International Criminal Court with debilitating sanctions unless the ICC’s charter (the Rome Statute) is amended to grant immunity to Donald Trump against war crimes after he leaves office.

So our president is not only above U.S. laws and moral norms, but he now claims a special privilege to defy international criminal law. I suppose this is consistent with Trump’s new foreign policy statement that lays claim to Latin America (in addition to Canada and Greenland) as our special “sphere of influence” and implicitly cedes Ukraine to Vladimir Putin as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence.”

In my 76 years, I never imagined having a president who is hell bent on turning the U.S. into a Dark Age fortress of lawless thugs.

Kennedy Richardson
Piedmont