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The Humble Pen Takes on the Mighty Sword

By Robert C. Koehler Here’s an anniversary no one wants to celebrate: The Columbine school shooting — April 20, 1999 — just passed its 25th anniversary. Fifteen dead (including the two shooters), twenty-one injured. A new era begins . . . Why, why, why bring up such a horrific event? Perhaps because it hasn’t stopped. […]

The ‘Accepted Insanity’ of World War III

By Robert C. Koehler “Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.” Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from […]

Survival Without Bombs or Borders

By Robert C. Koehler An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win! Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics — the souls in despair — tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once […]

No One Owns the Future

By Robert C. Koehler Even the international condemnation of the Israeli devastation of Gaza often feels tepid. Consider, for instance, the words of U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in the wake of Israel’s April 1 drone strike on a convoy of cars from World Central Kitchen, a disaster relief organization bringing food to starving Gazans. […]

War and the Soul of Desperation

By Robert C. Koehler I call it “naked insanity,” as in: the emperor has no clothes. He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom — not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons . . […]

A One-State Solution Could Transform the World

By Robert C. Koehler Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free. “Snort! No one wants this! It’s not possible — it’s not true!” My reply to the cynics is this: […]

Transcending Cultural Erasure

By Robert C. Koehler Oh Lord, kumbaya . . . As I absorb the daily news of war and global devastation, I sing these words to myself — quietly, yes, secretly, lest I ignite instant flash-bang sarcasm from the surrounding world. What next? A flower in a rifle barrel? Sarcasm spits in the face of […]

The Tears of War Belong to All of Us

By Robert C. Koehler First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! You can kill as many of them as you want. Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job […]

Changing the World with Fire and Love

By Robert C. Koehler The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible. I’m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire — doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match […]

The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality

By Robert C. Koehler For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us — the onlooking and supportive patriots — war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The reality of war should […]

Diversity in the Crosshairs

By Robert C. Koehler “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital . . .” No, this is not the official “you are now entering Dearborn, Michigan” sign, at the corner of Michigan and Wyoming avenues, or whatever. This prosperous Detroit suburb — not only the hometown of Henry Ford but my hometown as well, the place […]

Neck Deep in the Big Muddy

By Robert C. Koehler Read the news, hup, two, three, four! “Top United States officials prodded Israel on Monday to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip . . .” Thus began a recent, and oh so typical, piece of war reportage. It was purveyed by the New York Times but it’s something […]

The Need for Understanding Never Stops

By Robert C. Koehler I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon. For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human […]

We’re Still Moving ‘Beyond Vietnam’

By Robert C. Koehler “And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.” Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I’m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His […]

The Cry of the Wounded: End War

By Robert C. Koehler “I am begging the world: stop all the wars, stop killing people, stop killing babies. War is not the answer. . . .War is not how you fix things. This country, Israel, is going through horror. And I know the mothers in Gaza are going through horror. . . .” I […]

The Law of the Jungle: Our Teacher?

By Robert C. Koehler Perhaps the primary value of war – from the point of view of national leaders and their loyal followers – is that it places 100 percent of the blame for whatever’s wrong on the other guy: the enemy. And thus there’s no alternative but to kill “him,” which nowadays amounts to […]

Some Moments Never Go Away

By Robert C. Koehler “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Bobby come over!” I can feel the wind on my face, the gravel at my feet – oh so minutely, but with enough realness to pull me back seven decades, into one of the earliest moments of my becoming. For some reason I find myself, at […]

Poetry Bleeds from the Shattered Normal

By Robert C. Koehler What’s ordinary about life suddenly becomes sacred. This is my definition of poetry — my deepest plunge into being alive. It seems more relevant than ever, as innocent blood flows in the wars being waged by military-political bureaucracies across the planet. How many more stunned facial expressions will I see on […]

Takes One To Know One

By Robert C. Koehler There are a number of blatant ways for terrorist organizations – by which I mean national governments – to justify committing mass murder. Once you start killing, it’s hard to stop. But you have to justify what you’re doing – a process humanity has been engaged in since the dawn of […]

Humanity’s Bombs Are Aimed at Evolution

By Robert C. Koehler In most media coverage of war — including the hell in the Middle East, where World War III looms —the unexamined assumption is that we, the readers, are spectators, looking on as the missiles fly (mostly in one direction) and Good dukes it out with Evil yet again, Paradoxically, Good and […]

Empathy for the Worst of Us

By Robert C. Koehler . . . Why do I feel the urge to stroke the crime as though it were my child, to cup my hands around the horror and prevent it from going out? These words are a fragment of a poem I wrote a nearly a quarter of a century ago, after […]

Thankfulness Buried in the Rubble

By Robert C. Koehler Much as I love Thanksgiving — seeing my family . . . oh the turkey, oh the cranberry sauce —I feel like maybe a bomb fragment has hit the “thanks” part. I find myself struggling to let a sense of thankfulness flow, because when I do — and doing so has […]

Turning Conflict into Music?

By Robert C. Koehler Is the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem? “. . . I came to understand the role some in the U.S. government have played to intentionally catalyze war, fueling arms sales globally, without regard for the consequences. The consequences are here! “We are cartwheeling towards a massive East v. West war with […]

Militarism vs. Our Shared Humanity

By Robert C. Koehler Sitting safely at my desk, looking at photos of bombed buildings and knowing that missing children are buried under the rubble, imagining (unavoidably) what this must feel like . . . oh my God, empathy gives way to horror. Move on, I tell myself. Write about something else. All wars are […]

Let’s Stop Dehumanizing the Future

By Robert C. Koehler We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era. You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just […]

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