Common Wonders
Co-creating a culture of peace
Recent Articles
Here are the most recent articles!
susbscribe to our RSS feed
The Mental Limits of War
By Robert C. Koehler A Morning Consult poll winks at me from my inbox: 57 percent of Americans support more airstrikes in Syria. My eyeballs roll. Hopelessness permeates me, especially because I’m hardly surprised, but still . . . come on. This is nuts. The poll could be about the next move in a Call […]
Caligula with Orange Hair
By Robert C. Koehler So maybe this is how the U.S. demilitarizes, or the American public at least returns to the consciousness of the late ’60s, when protests rocked the streets and people demanded an end to the savagery in Vietnam: Donald Trump, the Fool in the Tarot deck, the harbinger of change, removes the […]
How Many Civilians Can We Kill?
By Robert C. Koehler “The wooden carts that residents use to carry vegetables and other wares in the once busy market area instead ferried out cadavers recovered from the rubble last week.” And so . . . another “precision” bomb strike in America’s war against terror. This was the scene in Mosul earlier this month, […]
The Mosque That Disappeared
By Robert C. Koehler We committed a quiet little war crime the other day. Forty-plus people are dead, taken out with Hellfire missiles while they were praying. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just insurgents. The women and children, if there were any, were . . . come on, you know the lingo, collateral damage. […]
The Deep State Hasn’t Gone Away
By Robert C. Koehler “In a statement to WikiLeaks, the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public . . .” Let me interrupt this quote from the world’s declassifier in chief, regarding its latest release of impertinent, humiliating and shocking data about the American security state, simply to […]
The Moment of the Fool
By Robert C. Koehler Obama . . . Trump. Could there be a bigger contrast — in attitude, style, comportment, philosophy? What irony that the two names are now linked in history: Donald Trump forever the successor to Barack Obama, forever the orange-haired blot on his legacy, forever the surrealistic next chapter of the American […]
A Crisis of Relevance
By Robert C. Koehler And the word of the moment is . . . opportunity: “What unites our party is a belief in opportunity, the idea that however you started out, whatever you look like, whoever you love, America is the place you can make it if you try.” Could you be any more tepid? […]
Costa Rica’s Peace Journey
By Robert C. Koehler “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have […]
The Great American Awakening
By Robert C. Koehler Old wounds break open. Deep, encrusted wrongs are suddenly visible. The streets flow with anger and solidarity. The past and the future meet. The news is All Trump, All the Time, but what’s really happening is only minimally about Donald Trump, even though his outrageous actions and bizarre alliances are the […]
The Mass Grave We Call Collateral Damage
By Robert C. Koehler “Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?” We have carnage and we have irony. The speaker is the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares […]
