The words, of course, merely summed up a moment in the news cycle last week. We, the news-consuming public, were primed – by CBS, but it could have been any mainstream outlet – for a tidbit of potential drama the next day in the hottest murder trial around right now. But in the process, we were also silently reminded, yet again, that everything is spectacle. At the level at which we call ourselves a nation, nothing is serious, not even matters of life and death.

There’s something so painful about all this – painful beyond the horror of the crime itself, or the national murder rate. The 24-7 media trivialize the stakes and gleefully report the “courtroom drama” as a sporting event; but even more distressingly, the legal bureaucracy swings into motion without the least awareness of any value beyond its own procedures. It all happens with a certainty of purpose that generates the illusion that things are under control and social order prevails.

But none of this has anything to do with what social order actually requires when harm has occurred, which is . . . healing.

The next day, at George Zimmerman’s bond hearing, he surprised his lawyer and everyone else by addressing Trayvon Martin’s parents directly, if pathetically: “I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am, and I did not know if he was armed or not.”

While the words, which fail utterly as an apology, may have been completely self-serving, as the lawyer for the murdered boy’s parents maintained, they may have been something else as well, and my sense is that they were – an anguished and flailing attempt to connect in some way, to bridge the terrible gap his act created. It’s possible it has dawned on George Zimmerman that he killed a fellow human being for no reason and may be caught forever on the wrong side of a fundamental moral divide. Another term for this is hell – and his presence there has nothing to do with the outcome of his trial.

The coverage of the shooting and the legal procedures that have taken control of the matter betray no awareness that the fundamental and eternal need of all concerned is to heal the rift of Trayvon Martin’s death. Such a thing, under the most ideal of circumstances, would take years; its accomplishment would be a miracle – but it happens, when victims or survivors are able to summon more courage than they thought they had and expand their own humanity toward forgiveness, reconciliation and love.

But in our legal system, we acknowledge only the need to determine guilt or innocence and the need to mete out punishment to the guilty – as though punishment closes the case and puts matters back in balance. In such a system, the victim himself quickly becomes irrelevant and, often enough, forgotten. And the lasting harm caused by the crime is utterly beside the point.

Indeed, crime and punishment are indivisibly part of the same wrong, or so it seems to me with increasing frustration and despair. The punishment is no more than society’s recoil action, meting out further harm, solving nothing and perpetuating the violence – at enormous expense, of course.

Why do we have such a system?

“Logically, the opposite of love is hatred; but Jung and others have pointed out that the psychological opposite to love is fear,” writes David R. Loy in an excellent essay called “Healing Justice : A Buddhist Perspective.”

“By no coincidence,” he goes on, “(Thomas) Hobbes’ theory of a social contract makes fear the origin of the state, for the absolute authority of the state is the only thing that can protect my self-interest from yours. True or not, that has become our myth: We legitimize the state’s justice insofar as we accept that it is needed to protect us from each other.”

Our system of what we call justice is built on a foundation of fear and social isolation. It codifies and perpetuates both, at the same time erecting barriers that separate all who are caught in the system from the larger human emotions that could save us.

And the mainstream media, instead crying out for a healing-based legal system or reporting with awareness that such a system is possible, spirals backwards into ever more cynical exploitation of public fear. “Mugs in the news,” for instance, now seems to be a mainstay on news websites: titillating mug shots of the unconvicted, obtained from local police departments, showing our fellow citizens in trouble, frozen in their awkward grimaces before the police camera. The point is ridicule, separation and perpetual spectacle: Look how bad they are!

Yet beyond the awareness of the media, systems of restorative or transformative justice are catching on around the world. Healing is an arduous process, but it’s possible – and it saves people’s lives. If we can break the separation we feel between those who have wronged us, if we can hear one another’s stories, the future suddenly fills with possibility.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

“To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.”

Wow, what fun — a new playground, with maybe 90 billion barrels waiting for corporate exploitation beneath the melting ice cap, 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas, and all sorts of minerals, diamonds, gold, copper, zinc and so much more. And the world’s armed forces get to play war games. Boys will be boys!

The first insanity here is that this is how major news is reported, as the sophomoric reduction of a terrifying global wound to a spectacle of pop culture, with military leaders portrayed as independent actors, taking it on themselves to prepare for inevitable war in or over the Arctic Circle, which is, thanks to global warming, now open for business.

There’s not the least pause in the breathless verbiage to reflect on the possible implications of climate change. There’s no attempt to widen the perspective of the story beyond the military-industrial competitive frenzy to exploit suddenly available resources. There’s no feint toward the future — just more of the same, nationalism and capitalism, flowing mindlessly to the Arctic like chemicals in a Petri dish. The message here seems to be: This is the final phase of human evolution, folks, so let’s make the most of it.

We haven’t developed a popular media yet that’s interested in or capable of reaching toward the bigger story in its global reportage. It’s stuck in the futility of zero-sum geopolitics. But it strikes me that now may be the time to expand our horizons.

For instance, a report issued two years ago by the Arctic Governance Project, notes: “Climate change is a reality rather than a future prospect in the Arctic. Serious impacts are occurring already; more are expected. These impacts take such diverse forms as the thinning and receding of sea ice; melting of glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost; altering of snow conditions; intensifying storm surges and coastal erosion; and declining populations of migratory animals.

“Some adaptive measures will take place entirely within the confines of national jurisdictions and be handled through domestic programs,” the report continues, then makes this small and obvious, yet stunning, observation: “But political and legal boundaries do not shape the impacts of climate change.”

What’s happening to our planet — to the womb and sustainer of all life, including our own — is bigger than the organizational structure we have thus far managed to achieve, and the first, if not the worst, mistake we can commit in response to the environmental crisis now unmistakably manifesting around us in so many ways is to stay trapped within our self-created boundaries. Enough small thought! “Political and legal boundaries do not shape the impacts of climate change.”

We have to begin thinking and organizing ourselves beyond the arbitrary constraints of nations and beyond our current, resource-devouring economic system. We have to imagine a global culture that doesn’t pit humanity against nature or itself and transcends the diminished goal of individual or national dominance, which sees success only as something measurable if there’s a loser.

You might say it’s time to grow up.

“So far, we humans have been children in relationship to earth,” writes Charles Eisenstein in his remarkable book Sacred Economics. He traces our growth process over the millennia, culminating in modern times:

“We had our adolescent growth spurt with industry, and on the mental plane entered through Cartesian science the extreme of separation, the fully developed ego and hyperrationality of the young teenager who, like humanity in the Age of Science, completes the stage of cognitive development known as ‘formal operations,’ consisting of the manipulation of abstractions. But as the extreme of yang contains the birth of yin, so does the extreme of separation contain the seed of what comes next: reunion.

“In adolescence,” Eisenstein writes, “we fall in love, and our world of perfect reason and perfect selfishness falls apart as the self expands to include the beloved within its bounds.”

The Associated Press is still writing about our perfect adolescent selfishness, but as the global systems in which we live change in utterly unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to expand our thinking to embrace the unfathomable . . . and this is what love is, though the word itself is inadequate to describe the opening in our psyches that must occur, and is occurring.

We must fall in love with the Earth — the living, sacred planet, this “dynamic system,” in the words of the Bolivian legislation acknowledging its rights, “made up of the undivided community of all living beings, who are all interconnected, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny.”

This is the future — the only future we have.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

In the pursuit of order, could we possibly be creating more chaos, not simply externally — in the shattered countries we’re leaving in our wake — but internally, in the minds of those soldiers?

The Los Angeles Times noted that Air Force pilot Patrick Burke was recently acquitted in a court-marital hearing on charges of auto theft, drunk driving and two counts of assault — due to “polysubstance-induced delirium.” This was, the Times explained, a turning point: the first official acknowledgement, by military psychiatrists and a court-martial judge, that the drugs that have become a routine part of military service — in Burke’s case, the prescribed amphetamine Dexedrine (“go pills”) — can contribute to temporary insanity.

Better living through chemistry!

The chemical fix pervades the whole culture, of course, and while drugs can produce astounding results, they are demonically seductive and always have a down side. And nowhere, it seems, is their misuse more dramatic than in the modern military.

“After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general,” Kim Murphy writes in the Times article. “Nearly 8 percent of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005.”

Murphy quotes psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written on the correlation between drug use and violence: “Prior to the Iraq war, soldiers could not go into combat on psychiatric drugs, period. Not very long ago . . . you couldn’t even go into the armed services if you used any of these drugs, in particular stimulants.”

Now he’s hearing from soldiers who tell him “the psychiatrist won’t approve their deployment unless they take psychiatric drugs.”

Uh, this sounds like addiction, and not on the part of the soldiers. The military itself is addicted to . . . well, as Murphy explains, “the modern Army psychiatrist’s deployment kit is likely to include nine kinds ofantidepressants, benzodiazepines for anxiety, four antipsychotics, two kinds of sleep aids, and drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a 2007 review in the journal Military Medicine.”

And the attorneys for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the alleged lone killer of 17 Afghans last month, have asked for a list of all the medications he was taking. There’s a great deal of speculation about whether he was on one drug in particular, the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, which has been linked to bizarre and violent behavior and induces what’s known in the ranks as “mefloquine rage.”

All of which makes me think of the out-of-control use of chemicals in global agribusiness, in its for-profit zeal to turn the planet’s arable land into endless acres of monoculture, in utter defiance of, and war against, the diversity of nature. This is our war against “pests” and “weeds,” and, like our war against “evil,” a.k.a., terrorism, or whatever, and our determination to impose an economic and political monoculture on the whole planet, we’re not simply losing, we’re destroying ourselves.

“‘Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,’ a Dow official said last month. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by . . . technology introduced 15 years ago,” Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote recently in Yale Environment 360 (reprinted at Common Dreams).

“Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity,” he went on, “the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it, and quickly.”

This is the domination mindset: As we seek dominion over nature and dominion over the nations of the world, we whack at our perceived enemies with an endless barrage of same old, same old, in increasingly lethal dosages. And when the war backs up into our psyches, we turn the chemical barrage on our own minds, on our own souls.

What will it take to transform institutionalized rage and fear into something that doesn’t emanate from the reptile brain? How do we put love into collective motion? Until we do, the world will keep looking more and more like a sci-fi techno-dystopia.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

This was during Sierra Leone’s civil war, 11 years of hell that ended in 2002 but in point of fact hasn’t really ended, because the survivors, their culture shattered, their sense of community broken, were left in a state of seemingly unbridgeable mistrust of one another. More than 50,000 people died in the war. Many more were crippled and disfigured; thousands of children were abducted and turned, on pain of death, into child soldiers — into murderers. This was the war that popularized the term “blood diamond.”

When the truce between government and rebels was signed, part of the agreement was amnesty. Those who took part in the brutality simply went home. So did those who had fled to refugee camps. The tension and mistrust, as victims and killers rebuilt their lives next to each other, were simply buried. But the vital communities built on sharing and storytelling, which thrived in Sierra Leone’s villages before the war, seemed to be gone forever.

Western justice — a Special Court established to prosecute the worst perpetrators of violence, and even a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — barely scratched the surface of the matter. But human-rights activist John Caulker was convinced that within the broken traditions of his native country — the culture of vital connection, of truth-telling and forgiveness — lay the seeds of reconciliation. He knew that virtually everyone in Sierra Leone longed for reconciliation. But his idea of bringing the truth commission into the bush was rebuffed by the U.N.’s experts on such matters. It’s never been done that way, they said. It will never work.

So Caulker founded an organization called Fambul Tok, which means, in Krio, “Family Talk.” In its first two years, it has conducted 55 healing ceremonies in villages throughout Sierra Leone — some of which are the subject of a searing documentary called Fambul Tok, one of the entries this year in Chicago’s Peace on Earth Film Festival. As I watched it, I knew I had to write about it — seldom have I seen such disturbing subject matter transformed by the alchemy of forgiveness.

Director Sara Terry says on her website that, as she began following Caulker and the Fambul Tok volunteers around the country, she made the decision to keep Western incredulity and skepticism out of the narrative:

“My standpoint as a filmmaker would be to take their standpoint, to let their words, their stories, their lives show me, show all of us, why forgiveness was possible for them. Because maybe then, we might begin to learn why forgiveness is possible for the rest of us.”

“Fifteen men beat us and raped us . . .”

Fambul Tok begins here, at a bonfire. It’s nighttime. The fire blazes. Dozens or maybe hundreds of villagers are sitting around the fire, drumming, chanting. The woman steps out of the crowd and tells her story.

When she’s finished, a man steps reluctantly forward. “He is the man,” she says.

He looks at her: “To begin,” he says, “I apologize. It was not my intention to do it. They hit me and said if I didn’t join them I’d be killed. I ask Esther to forgive me. From now on I will do anything she wants. Anything she asks of me I will do for her. Please forgive me.”

He falls to his knees. “I forgive him,” she says. Someone asks if she really means it. She repeats:”Yes, I forgive him.”

Then they do a sort of forgiveness dance — a dance that’s repeated throughout the film, as the circle of truth-telling and reconciliation travels from village to village. They hold hands and sway back and forth. The crowd joins them. There’s chanting and drumming.

As the film progresses, the stories of violence and horror intensify. Two former best friends speak. They were little boys when the rebels came into their village. One of the boys, on pain of death, beat the other one; then he stabbed the boy’s father with a knife he was given. Before carrying this out, he himself had been wounded. Both boys tell their stories. The killer is forgiven. They hug. They do the forgiveness dance.

A large part of the film revolves around the search for a man named Tamba Joe, a villager who joined the rebels and was responsible for some of the most gruesome violence imaginable. He came back to his old village and led a massacre of former neighbors and friends, including their children. One villager tells of witnessing Tamba Joe murder — and, my God, behead — 17 members of his family. The horror of his story is almost beyond reckoning, but he speaks only with a gentle sadness. He wants reconciliation. He wants Tamba Joe to return to Foendor and face his victims; he wants to forgive him.

Tamba Joe is never found, but his three sisters, whose lives have also been shattered by the killings — who are bereft at the broken connections to their former home — participate in a Fambul Tok circle and receive forgiveness on their brother’s behalf. One of them later videotapes a message for her brother: “Don’t be afraid,” she pleads. “Anything can happen for us. And everything has an end. I believe you are forgiven.”

By the film’s end, Tamba Joe remains in hiding, or perhaps he has died, but his former rebel commander, notorious for his brutality, breaks down in tears as he listens to the message. The commander opens up to John Caulker and begins speaking truthfully, for the first time, about what he did in the war. And so the reconciliation process continues, and Sierra Leone slowly rebuilds itself.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

I say this just to calm myself down after a morning of media overkill, so to speak. There are so many murdered mothers and children in the news, some with names and faces, so many just adding anonymously to one death toll or another.

An Iraqi mom, 32 years old, is beaten to death in her house in El Cajon, Calif. A note by her body reads: “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Was it a hate crime? An isolated incident?

The guy who killed Trayvon Martin is still at large, somewhere. But his 2005 mug shot is everywhere, making him the poster child of vigilante justice. Do I have to reduce the killer to that viral scowl to feel compassion for Trayvon?

Dehumanization, the death of the human soul, is now reaching an advanced stage and its consequences are spreading across the country and the planet like global warming. I feel my own immune system breaking down. I can’t absorb the news anymore without hearing a deep alarm go off somewhere, insistent, berserk.

It’s not just the violence. Violence is a symptom — of social brokenness, alienation, profound disconnection at so many levels, perpetuated by our institutions and popular culture.

So I think about the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi and the Afghan civilians allegedly murdered by a lone, drunk American soldier (with the implausibility of the official scenario of yet another lone gunman growing in magnitude) and I feel myself groping for so much more, in all these tragedies, than — at best — the discharge of sterile justice.

The soldier, whisked out of Afghanistan, is sequestered in a holding cell in Kansas: “Sgt. Robert Bales Joins Military’s Notorious Criminals at Ft. Leavenworth,” ran the ABC News headline. This is like a cartoon show of crude stereotypes.

And we’re told he could get the death penalty, the ultimate in sterile, meaningless justice, especially considering that it would be the outcome of a U.S. military trial and serve the purpose of shutting up the scapegoat for good. We know, in our hearts and guts, that something more is necessary here than the playing out of bureaucratic logic, as though the murder of 17 people is a procedural error. This is not a matter of “break the rule, pay the fine,” yet as a society we lack sufficient wisdom to think about it any other way.

How can we know so little? How is it that we lack, as a society, what we once had, that is to say, wisdom and a sense of connection to the larger whole?

“It is an Ojibway teaching,” writes Rupert Ross in Returning to the Teachings, “that healthy relationships — and ‘a good life’ — depend on constantly cultivating seven attributes: Respect, Caring, Sharing, Kindness, Honesty, Strength and Humility.”

I’m sick of hearing ideas like this ground cynically into self-parody or reduced to idealistic singsong: Can’t we all just get along? I’m sick of cynicism itself and society’s unchecked impulse to create enemies, an impulse that serves so many agendas in our Darwinian world.

I refrain, as a matter of spiritual discipline, from turning even neighborhood-watch gunman George Zimmerman into my enemy or nailing his arrogantly grimacing picture up at my personal altar of hate, much as I shudder at the Florida law that empowered him, allowing him to “stand his ground,” stalk and murder a black teenager.

What good does it do to hyper-simplify the complexity not just of the crime but of the loss? All crimes, but especially murders, rend the social fabric, tear open the soul; all crimes occur in a context; and they are committed by whole, complex people acting from their unconscious depths. Western bureaucratic justice is incapable of bringing wisdom to any of this. And it is incapable of, and has no interest in, helping victims and survivors heal from their tragedies. It just wants to balance its books.

“Western law,” writes Ross, “seems to assume we are captains of our own ships and that each of us is equally capable of moving out of antisocial behavior on our own, just by deciding to do so. Traditional wisdom suggests that each of us rides a multitude of waves, some stretching back centuries, which we cannot fundamentally change and which will still confront us tomorrow.”

We cannot kill our way to peace.

Understanding this, I wish only for a moment of collective calm and a social shift toward forgiveness. Let the moment be fleeting, but let us feel the harm we keep inflicting on ourselves and then both seek and bestow forgiveness for all we have done. And let us drop our weapons, if only for that moment, so we can understand that it’s possible.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

This is one of the more bizarre details of his life that has come breathlessly to light in the media, along with his big smile, arrest record and disastrous financial dealings. The word was “hadji” (misspelled “hagi”), which is the racial slur of choice among U.S. troops to denigrate Iraqis; and stories where I have read about his use of it fixate on it judgmentally, as though to suggest it might explain something: the tiny flaw that reveals a propensity for massacring children.

Something had to be wrong with him, right? As always, the mainstream media’s unquestioning assumption is that the atrocity is the work of an individual nut . . . a flawed patriot, a bad apple. Oh so quietly ignored is the possibility that there’s something wrong with the military system and culture that produced him.

Indeed, a Wall Street Journal article reporting on the “hadji” story saw fit to point out that “U.S. commanders spent years trying in vain to end the use of the term” — implying a crisply righteous sense of social responsibility at the highest levels of the military, a pervasive culture of political correctness enforced by the chain of command, which, alas, sometimes breaks down in the ranks. What can you do? Sigh. Boys will be boys.

The media obsession with Bales’ individuality — flawed, perhaps, but heart-breakingly all-American as well (“At Home, Asking How ‘Our Bobby’ Became War Crime Suspect,” ran the New York Times headline) — ignores basic systems psychology, which understands that nobody exists in a vacuum. One person’s aberrant behavior releases the pressure building up in the whole system. In this case, the system is the Army. Could there be something for the media to explore here that would be even more productive than talking to Robert Bales’ childhood neighbor or former principal?
Could there be, for instance, something in the dehumanization of the enemy — a process that makes it possible for soldiers to go against their own nature and take human lives — that results in their own dehumanization as well?

In the midst of the outpouring of news about the Afghan massacre, I started thinking about the extraordinary Winter Soldier hearings held outside Washington, D.C., four years ago. There were four days of testimony on the cruelly dysfunctional war on terror. Two panels were devoted to the topic “Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy.” The panelists talked about how they learned contempt and disgust for all Iraqis and how it manifested on the ground in Iraq, where Robert Bales served three tours.

Here are some salient quotes:

“I joined the Army on my 18th birthday. When I joined I was told racism was gone from the military. After 9/11, I (began hearing) towel head, camel jockey, sand nigger. These came from up the chain of command. The new word was hadji. A hadji is someone who takes a pilgrimage to Mecca. We took the best thing from Islam and made it the worst thing.” — Mike Prysner

“Hadji was used to dehumanize anyone there who is not us. KBR employees who did our laundry became hadji. Not a person, not a name, but a hadji. ‘They’re just hadjis. Who cares?’ The highest ranking officer, Gen. Casey, used the word. He called Iraqi people hadjis. These things start at the top, not the bottom.” — Geoff Millard

“The military turned hadji into a disempowering word. My sergeant major said, ‘The hadji is an obstacle. Get him out of the way.’ Denying a person their name gave us permission to separate ourselves from the people of Iraq.” Thus when a boy was hit by a truck, the CO said: “He’s gone, move out.” — Mike Totten

“A freshly captured detainee had been denied his insulin. He was a hadji and probably he won’t die, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. This is what the CO said in denying permission to hospitalize him. His diabetic stroke was mistaken for insubordination. They pepper-sprayed him and put him in a holding cell, where he died.” — Andrew Duffy

“It’s almost impossible to act on your morality. . . . You remove the humanity from them — beat them — and in doing so you remove humanity from yourself.” — Carlos Mejia

Does this begin to penetrate the mystery that so confounds the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media? Stories of American troops’ horrific treatment of Iraqis and Afghans are endless. Most of the time, such treatment was well within the context of orders. Contempt for the people we were “liberating” permeated the chain of command. In 2003, the Washington Post reported that a Defense Department computer program for calculating collateral damage was called “Bugsplat.”

And as the aunt of former Pfc. Steven Green, who was convicted of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her, her parents and her 7-year-old sister, said at Green’s sentencing, “We did not send a rapist and murderer to Iraq.”

The time has come to challenge the military at the level of its reason for being. The time has come to add up its suicides, its war crimes and the rest of its horrific legacy. How long can it survive an honest accounting?

Can we talk about spiritual cancer?

In the extraordinary documentary On the Bridge — an unstinting look at the reality of war and the terror of PTSD, directed by Olivier Morel — each of the six Iraq vets who opens his or her heart in the course of the film has a moment of deep, almost unbearable silence at the end, staring into the camera and through the camera at the viewer . . . and at the nation they are committed to waking up. In that silence, those are the questions that begin to emerge.

On the Bridge bares the deep psychic wounds of America’s returning vets — “I liken (PTSD) to the comedic scene of opening a closet and stuff keeps falling out,” Jason Moon said at one point — but it does much more than that as well. It puts these wounds into context: We are the aggressor nation, not simply at the geopolitical level, invading and occupying a nation and commandeering its resources, but at human level, with American GIs routinely dehumanizing and brutalizing Iraqis on the streets and in their homes.

“When I was over there, a lot of saddening stuff happened,” Moon explained. “I couldn’t process it — I couldn’t cry. I’d have been considered a pussy. You have to stay in the group. If you lose your position, it’s dangerous. So you just kind of stuff it all down. Then you get home . . . ‘we’d like to talk to you.’ You open that door to converse with an emotion — it’s gigantic. Never (before) in my life did I have emotions I couldn’t control.”

But the reason for the enormity of these emotions — provoking endless thoughts of suicide — is because the vets are haunted by guilt over what they witnessed and what they did.

“I laughed as I heard a story,” said Ryan Endicott. “One of the platoons had strapped dead bodies from a gunfight on the hoods of their Humvees and then drove around the city for hours. . . . One (day) they brought in a car that had just been shot up. The driver’s fully intact brain was sitting in the back seat of the car. I walked over to the body bag with the passenger in it. The bag began twitching and we could hear his body still attempting to breathe. We laughed as we stomped the bag.”

And Moon: “We had some soldiers who would do some really nasty things. They played this game — if the kids come under the yellow tape, you’re allowed to butt stroke them in the head. This is the standing rule. The kids know it. So the soldiers would take a $20 bill and they’d bury it in the sand with just a little bit of the leaf hanging out. Then they’d go hide behind the trucks and pretend like they weren’t watching.

“That’s a month’s pay, twenty bucks, for an Iraqi. So eventually some Iraqi kid comes and starts eying it up, and then as soon as he got under the tape they’d come out with the butts of their rifles. It was like a game. They were trying to lure the kid in so they could hit him.”

Moon, who was a convoy driver, also talked about the orders all drivers were given at one point: “If kids get in the road, we’re ordered to run them over. Don’t stop — it could be an ambush. I said I can’t do that. I have a 3-year-old at home. I’d rather die fighting insurgents than run over a kid. I told the chain of command ‘I can’t.’ They heard ‘I won’t.’ They stuck me in the rear of the convoy — the most dangerous spot.”

Grappling with his incredulity at such orders — at how few of his fellow soldiers acknowledged that running over children, that mistreating Iraqi civilians, might provoke hatred and fuel the insurgency — he said: “I literally felt like I was in an alternate universe. I was almost convinced for a while this was by design, that there has to be some mad genius (who decided) we need a perpetual war. How can we make this happen? . . . I started going numb.”

Such truth-telling begins to get at the flavor of On the Bridge. The film opens up the private consciences of deeply troubled, painfully articulate, young men and women. Also appearing in the film are the parents and sister of Jeffrey Lucey, a former Marine and Iraq vet who hanged himself in 2004. The family talked with remarkable candor about Jeff’s ordeal, about the private hell that no one could penetrate.

As his father, Kevin, put it: “PTSD is a cancer of the spirit.”

Among the horrors Jeff wrestled with was the fact he had killed two Iraqi soldiers at close range. He was ordered to shoot. They said, “Pull the fucking trigger.” He closed his eyes and shot. For the rest of his life, he wore the dog tags of the two soldiers around his neck. “He felt personally responsible for their deaths,” his sister said. “He wore the tags around his neck to honor them. It reminded him every day of what he did.”

Vet suicides have been skyrocketing. According to a figure cited at the end of the film, they may be as high as 8,000 a year now. The VA is an inept bureaucracy, utterly unable to cope with a problem they can’t fix in any case, because the problem plunges to the bottom of the American soul. The vets who take their lives are trying to atone for what they were told to do, what they were forced to turn into, in the name of their country.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Building community is a sacred process, so I begin here, with a Chinese proverb that a healer and social worker turned into a song. The sacred has an intensely personal dimension to it, and the singing bird rips it open for me.

Three weeks ago I wrote a column called “The Barbara Tree,” in which I talked about two things: the orange papier-mâché bird that mysteriously appeared on a branch of the linden tree that had been planted in a nearby park in honor of my late wife; and a blog-in-progress I’m in the process of launching, with some friends, called Chicago Spirit, which seeks to celebrate the world-in-progress that so many people are creating: the world beyond war, eco-exploitation, domination consciousness, spectator culture and the privatization of the commons.

I invited response, i.e., participation, having no idea what it would look like. This is not a simple world, as cynics would dismiss it. It’s a world of risky reaching out, groping for connection. What I got was music, art, story. What I got was politics, courage and craftsmanship, sometimes wrapped around anger, more often wrapped around love. And birds and trees kept showing up in fascinating and heart-wrenching ways.

“I too lost my wife to a long term disease and I think of her often,” wrote Michael Boyter. “Paula also loved birds and our back yard was transformed by her love and care into a national bird sanctuary.”

And so begins community, at the level of loss and truth. “I have a college degree in Environmental Studies and Solar Energy Design,” he went on. “I understand what we need to do to save our planet, our environment and our civilization. Has it gone too far down to be saved?

“Repowering hope,” he said, “that is something that needs to be done for the people of the USA and the world.”

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Suzanne Ross of the Raven Foundation, quoting Emily Dickinson. The foundation’s mission is to make “religion reasonable, violence unthinkable and peace a possibility.”

And so the responses intertwine.

“‘Lipa,’ wrote Vesna Reberak, “is a linden tree in Slovenian and many other Slavic languages. LIPA — Links for International Promotion of the Arts — (is) an international arts exchange program started in Washington, D.C. as an Artist for Peace program after my husband died in a mountain climbing accident in 1997.”

The LIPA website informs us that she is curating a traveling exhibit called “To Fear or Not to Fear,” which “is bringing together artists from Iraq, Iran, Israel, Northern Ireland, Russia, Bosnia and the USA, the places that are inflicted with violence and crisis. It explores deeper humanity that hopes to dispel notions of clashing civilizations with common ground.”

We’re caught in systems of exploitation and alienation, imprisoned in our sense of self. Creativity stirs the future.

“I wanted to introduce you to Sandhills Farm to Table Cooperative,” Fenton Wilkinson wrote from North Carolina. “I initiated the project to be a tool for creative healing through demonstrating what a new values system of commerce might look like, where the win-lose mentality is replaced by win-win ‘we’re all in this together’ — our favorite saying.

“Your comment about Baltimore’s City Springs School — ‘a philosophy of teaching, keeping order and creating community that involves everyone as a full, equal participant’ — struck a particular cord, given that SF2T is the first co-op in the country where all the parties to the commercial transaction (growers, consumers and staff) are all equal owners.”

And Barbara Lee Henson wrote describing herself as “an antique child of 68 years young, stroke survivor (it took the use of the right side of my body but not my spirit!). That bird is hope for us all.

“One day my husband wheeled me into the garden he had planted with a sign that said ‘Barbara’s Paradise.’ I stared at a hydrangea flower and thought, ‘I could draw that! Just little dots of pink and blue and lavender!’ I went back inside and found the simple art program that came as a basic on the computer. Using my mouse (his name was Chester), I drew my first picture!”

Her son eventually installed a more sophisticated paint software package and “I was like a kid in a penny candy store with 25 cents to spend! I was alive again! I could do something! I could create Art. I awoke each morning with excitement! New ideas!”

She added: “The enemies of our nation are not other nations, but CANCER!!!! GREED!!!!! BIGOTRY!!!!”

And suddenly I’m full circle, back where I started, communing with Will Fuderman, musician, acupuncturist (author of a manuscript titled Deeper Than Prozac: Emotional Healing with Chinese Medicine), who sent me a YouTube link to his song “Green Tree.” As I listened, I realized, shaking with awe, that the singing bird has landed.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Let’s take a moment — in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama’s recent austerity budget proposal — to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we’re creating.

First of all, the grotesque insult of “austerity” in the shadow of limitless military spending is destroying our national sanity. And the proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven’t yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we’re spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war.

The official 2012 Defense budget of $530 billion, and just a shade under that for 2013, leaves out an enormous amount of defense-related government spending. According to a recent piece in The Atlantic, when you add in, oh, the cost of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, our spending on nuclear weapons development (relegated to the Department of Energy budget), Homeland Security, veterans’ medical care (inadequate as it is, but rising), military aid to allies ($3 billion to Israel, for instance), and interest on the military’s portion of the debt (projected to be $63.7 billion in 2013), our defense spending almost doubles, to $986.1 billion in 2012 and $994.3 billion in 2013.

In the last 13 years, according to Business Insider, U.S. military spending has increased 114 percent. We spend more on the military than the next 15 biggest military spenders combined — and more than all 50 states spend, in total, on health, education, welfare and safety. In 2007, some $11 billion was simply written off as “lost” in Iraq, the Business Insider story notes.

And the military is, in effect, our 51st state, albeit one surrounded by barbed wire. “The total known land area occupied by U.S. bases and facilities is 15,654 square miles — bigger than D.C., Massachusetts, and New Jersey combined,” according to the article.

And beyond anything that appears on a ledger sheet, the unregulated military has carte blanche to spend the earth’s resources and contaminate the planet. “The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world,” Lucinda Marshall wrote at Common Dreams several years ago, “producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined.”

This waste includes pesticides and defoliants (e.g., Agent Orange), solvents, petroleum, lead, mercury and, horrifically, depleted uranium and nuclear fallout. The military’s legacy — in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, where we have fought recent wars; on the tiny island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. Navy tested weapons for more than 60 years; and in the Nevada desert and the Marshall Islands, where we tested our nuclear weapons above ground — is cancer, birth defects and a devastated environment.

All to what end? “National defense” is perhaps the most cynical — and effective — lie in human history, commanding the quaking allegiance of the populace over and over again, justifying virtually any activity, devouring the planet’s resources, and ever failing to deliver the promised peace, indeed, delivering only the conditions for the next war. Few things in today’s world are more unsettling than the fact that “national defense” still owns the country’s politics, its budget — and the minds of far too many of its citizens.

Welcome, then, to Keene, N.H., a town of 23,000 people that, despite its low crime rate and general friendliness, was set at the end of last year to score a “tank” — actually, an eight-ton Bearcat armored personnel vehicle — for its police department, thanks to a nearly $300,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security.

When the news began circulating, the townspeople, instead of going along with the deal, actually stood up to the mayor and city council, not simply questioning the need for this military vehicle (even though it was “free”), but expressing concern that the militarization of the police department could harm their community.

An anti-tank petition garnered 500 signatures, and earlier this month more than 100 people, mostly opposing the tank, showed up at a city council meeting to speak their minds, according to the Keene Sentinel.

“This vehicle is continuing to fund the culture of war in this country, and Congress will continue to fuel the culture of war unless we do something,” said Terry Clark, the lone city councilor to oppose the deal, as quoted in the Sentinel. “Do we want a militarized police force in Keene? We can take the lead and ask the council to rescind its decision, and have the courage to do what Congress does not.”

In contrast, the Bearcat was defended by the government sales manager for Lenco, the vehicle’s manufacturer, as quoted in Huffington Post: “I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target.’ . . . If a group of terrorists decide to shoot up a shopping mall in a town like Keene, wouldn’t you rather be prepared?”

The residents of Keene have so far said no to the fear peddlers. May their stand give all of us the courage to do the same.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Suddenly a big orange blossom fills the screen, accompanied by ukuleles and lovely — I mean Strangelovian — Polynesian music. The blossom is actually Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb blast, the largest U.S. test ever, detonated over Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.

This is a few minutes into Nuclear Savage: The Island Experiments of Secret Project 4.1, one of the most disturbing documentaries I’ve ever seen, and one of seven feature-length films that are part of Chicago’s fourth annual Peace on Earth Film Festival, Feb. 23-26, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The event, once again, is free of charge.

Peace on earth?

The film festival seeks to “enlighten and to empower individuals, families and communities to step out of the ignorance of conflict . . .”

I take a deep breath and think about Nuclear Savage, a film by former Greenpeace activist Adam Jonas Horowitz, which opens up one of the hidden horrors of American history — analogous to our history of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow — but perpetrated on the far side of the world, with nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Savage is the story of what we did to the Marshall Islanders throughout the Cold War with our nuclear testing program. Not only did we expose many thousands of them to ghastly — often lethal — levels of radiation with 67 nuclear blasts, with glaring evidence that at least some of the exposure was intentional, done for the purpose of studying the effects of radiation on human guinea pigs; not only did we wreck the Marshall Islanders’ way of life and pristine paradise, creating a nation of internal refugees confined to a Western-style slum on the island of Ebeye; not only did we cower, as a nation, from any real responsibility for what our fallout did to these people, settling our genocidal debt to them with $150 million “for all claims, past, present and future”; but also, throughout our dealing with them as nuclear conquistadors, we displayed a racism so profound, so cold-blooded, its exposure must forever shatter the myth of American exceptionalism.

And we’re still doing it. The tiny, impoverished Republic of the Marshall Islands recently signed a 75-year lease agreement with the United States, guaranteeing that the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalien Atoll, where Star Wars testing is still being conducted (for unfathomable billions of dollars), will be operational at least through 2086.

“John is a savage, but a happy, amenable savage.” Thus intones the voice on a ’50s-era newsreel clip in the documentary, showing footage of seven male Marshall Islanders who have been brought to the United States for radiation testing. “John is mayor of Rongelap Atoll. John reads, knows about God and is a pretty good mayor.”

The film does a stunning job juxtaposing examples of our smug ignorance of South Sea culture with the reality of what we did to it. John the happy savage is actually John Anjain, who is one of many former residents of Rongelap Atoll interviewed in the film. He talks about his thyroid cancer, the thyroid cancer of three of his children and one grandson, and about the death of another son from leukemia.

Rongelap was heavily contaminated by the Castle Bravo blast. The official explanation is that the wind suddenly shifted. Many of the islanders believe that the wind direction was known and the blast occurred anyway. The U.S. Navy waited several days before evacuating the island. In 1957, the Rongelapese were told their island was safe again — a blatant untruth — and were transported back to their ancestral home, where they proceeded to die of cancer and give birth to large numbers of stillborn, deformed children. The bodies of many of the islanders were removed by U.S. personnel and examined.

“My first child born did not look human,” one of the islanders said. “It was like a bunch of grapes. The second came out limp, with no muscles or bones at all. It was like a monster, a jellyfish, completely limp. It was a jellyfish baby.”

A year before they were moved back to Rongelap, Merril Eisenbud, the first health and safety chief of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, had said, according to the transcript of a 1956 meeting: “That island is by far the most contaminated place on earth and it would be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment. . . . While it is true that these people do not live the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is also true that these people are more like us than the mice.”

They lived on Rongelap till 1985, when they were finally evacuated, not by the United States, which refused to do so, but in the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. They took everything, including their dismantled homes; they left behind only their cemetery.

Thinking about this extraordinary documentary in the context of the Peace on Earth Film Festival, I am mostly aware of the gap the film exposes: between the ideals of most of the world’s population and the interests of the powerful. We’re a long way from peace, and maybe we always will be, but never have I felt a stronger urge to work for it.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.