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.

When I went out to investigate, sure enough, it was still there, a brightly painted, reddish-orange papier-mâché bird, dangling on a wire from a low branch.

I live in the far north corner of Chicago, half a mile from Lake Michigan. Some years ago, I donated money to the Chicago Park District and they planted a tree of my choosing (a linden) in honor of my late wife. This is the Barbara tree, which I visit regularly. It has no plaque announcing its name or status; it’s just a tree, barely more than a sapling, standing on a tiny rise in Loyola Park, overlooking the lake. About 12 feet away stands the Fred tree, a silver maple, planted in honor of my sister’s late husband, who died a year and a half after Barbara did. Both died of cancer.

I haven’t written about these deaths, or the nature of grief, in a long time. Life goes on, unfolding unpredictably every day. My long-ago sense of irreplaceable loss has been given over, in many ways, to the tree, to life, to my grown-up kid, to the column I write and to a wary optimism that love is shaping the future despite so many reports to the contrary.

I’m appalled by these reports – of economic fissure, the rise of the corporatocracy, the collapse of social services, the rape of the commons, the insane drumbeat for another war – but insist in this moment on celebrating the infinitesimal positive.

I have no idea who hung a bird on the Barbara tree. Hardly anyone knows about the tree. I surmise it was a stranger because a friend would have told me; and if it was a stranger, the Barbara tree was decorated at random, without awareness that it stands as a memorial to a mom and passionate public-interest attorney who died, at age 50, in 1998. That this is probably the case delights me beyond all reason.

Maybe much of my delight is due to the fact that I’m working with some friends on a project that celebrates participatory consciousness and the giving economy – that pushes against the grinding alienation of our times. We’re developing a blog called Chicago Spirit, and we’re hoping that lots of people will want to contribute writing, art and perhaps things we do not yet imagine to it. Maybe even papier-mâché birds.

This is the mission statement:

“Never has a time been more ripe or urgent for ordinary citizens to step up in the fullness of their humanity and not simply demand but create change in how society functions and how we live our lives.

“Chicago Spirit seeks to celebrate and further the powerful creative and healing forces emerging in our city: in politics, the arts, education, the environment, law enforcement and all other ways. In so doing, we seek to collaborate in uniting these local efforts with the great awakening nationally and globally. We declare this awakening to be the dawn of a vibrant, unprecedented global peace.”

Two weeks ago I wrote about being part of a Men’s Art Forum retreat in which a man found liberation from the ghosts of his past in a drawing exercise. It was an example of what we have dubbed, at Chicago Spirit, “art beyond ego”: art that aligns with the primal urge to create; art whose purpose is to heal, not merely to distract (i.e., “entertain”).

Chicago Spirit seeks to expand the idea of creative healing to every facet of our lives. Last week I wrote about a program of restorative practices in place at Baltimore’s City Springs School – a philosophy of teaching, keeping order and creating community that involves everyone as a full, equal participant. This is far from a simple idea. One skeptical reader at Huffington Post posted this remarkable comment:

“Nice sentiment but far from possible. Consider the following scenario: You are a high school teacher and teach upwards of 140 students a day, most of whom are ‘troubled.’ You lead special lessons about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You spend time sitting next to students, making eye contact, asking them ‘What is wrong?’ and ‘How can I help you?’ You hold your students to high standards and explain why it is important. You build a community around dialogues and reflections AND teach a foreign language worthy of high school credit.

“Now add 5-10 interruptions per class period, no disciplinary support if there is a fight, unsafe hallway outside your room, and students who are: hungry, abused, sick, high, work the night shift, live with an older sibling, take 3 city busses to come to school, who see nothing wrong with stealing, lying, cheating, cursing, or fighting after being ‘dissed’ and who only listen to you in-between tweets. In addition, redo this whole scenario on a trimester schedule with two more sets of 140 students to begin the whole process over again. Oh, and by the way, the average amount of absences from school is: 20 for the first trimester. Do you understand my skepticism?”

How do we proceed in the face of impossible odds? I seek not to falsely minimize those odds or belittle the writer’s skepticism. I seek to honor both and still celebrate the possible future, the one where, among so much else, the efforts of heroic teachers aren’t lost in dying (or murdered) school systems.

And against all odds I’m imagining a mysterious red-orange papier-mâché bird as a harbinger of that future.

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.

Can the world shift on such a simple question? Imagine yourself sitting eye-to-eye with a kid in trouble and that’s the first thing you ask. No lecture, no sarcasm, no judgment, no explosion of lost patience and a cry of “Why did you do that?” Just: What happened?

And then you wait for an answer. When it comes, however haltingly, you press gently and firmly on, still without judgment, just the need to know:

What were you thinking at the time?

What have you thought about since?

What do you think you need to do to make things right?

These are the four basic questions of restorative practices, a movement slowly transforming troubled schools and troubled communities around the globe — a movement replacing zero tolerance and other punishment-based and wildly ineffective practices that increase people’s feelings of separation and alienation from one another.

“I found myself running down the hall all the time because of fights,” Rhonda Richetta told me, speaking of her early days as principal of Baltimore’s City Springs School, a K-8 school in a tough inner-city neighborhood. “I would look at kids’ faces. Everyone looked angry, like they didn’t want to be here — adults and children both.”

In poverty-wracked neighborhoods, this is the American school system. “Education” takes place in a context of anger, violence, intimidation and arrest. The kids are struggling not to learn but “just to survive,” as Ted Wachtel, founder and director of the Bethlehem, Pa.-based International Institute for Restorative Practices, put it.

“How as a society can we live with that?”

At City Springs, one of four charter schools run by the Baltimore Curriculum Project, Richetta had no intention of living with the situation she had just walked into. This was in 2007. In her quest to change the environment of her school, she learned about IIRP and took training in restorative practices, an extensive philosophy of community-building based on respect, listening and truth-telling rather than punishment. Unlike traditional methods of keeping order in troubled schools, restorative practices require everyone’s full participation, not merely their obedience. It’s a philosophy of “high limit-setting and high encouragement,” Wachtel said.

And Richetta was positive it would work at City Springs. Five years later, with her vision firmly in place, the effectiveness of restorative practices is obvious. I spent half a day at City Springs recently, as part of my own determination to see how people are creating peace on our planet. I sat in “proactive circles” with first-graders and eighth-graders, listening and participating as the kids checked in and talked about how they were doing that day. One teacher said the proactive circle, held not in response to a problem but simply to get the day started, was like taking a daily vitamin. Kids and adults connect with each other and a context of respect and mutual cooperation is established anew.

What I was part of that morning was the result of five years of painstaking effort, on the part of Richetta and others at the school, to apply restorative practices in every situation: five years of patience, listening and asking “what happened?” This question “jolts the kid,” Richetta noted. Suddenly the boy or girl who has gotten into trouble realizes, “Oh, she wants to hear my side” — and begins talking, and becomes part of the solution, not the problem.

When such a program is in place, it seems like common sense itself. But five years ago, Richetta explained, she faced enormous resistance — not from the kids, who hungered to tell their truth, but from the teachers. Many of them couldn’t believe talking and circle work would be supplanting suspensions. Lots of them left. But she held her ground.

One story she told me illustrates the depth of the change at City Springs. At Perkins Homes, the nearby public housing development where most of the students live, two groups of boys from different courtyards developed an intense, violent rivalry, and daily fighting was the norm. The assistant principal at the time was adamant that the animosity among the boys would overwhelm any circle process and the two groups had to be kept separated. The school put a lot of energy into doing so, but things eventually erupted anyway.

“Finally I said, I don’t care what anybody says, we’re putting them all in a circle,” Richetta said. The idea of a conflict circle is to get enemies to listen to one another, no easy task, and “at first it didn’t go well. We had to keep pulling disruptive kids out.”

But eventually the two sides began talking and “what started to come out of the whole conversation was how ridiculous it was. They were fighting over nothing — it was amazing to me to sit there and hear them. This is so ridiculous. These boys were fighting and wanting to kill each other over nothing!”

And gradually this awareness dawned on all the participants. Finally one of the principle ringleaders stood up and shook a rival’s hand, and others followed suit. “These kids became friends at school,” Richetta said, “but when they went into the neighborhood they had to pretend they were enemies.”

And this is why the peace-building process has no boundaries. “The word about restorative practices should be spread around the world,” Richetta said. “I’m grateful for what it has done to transform this school. What if we could transform this community, this city, the whole nation?”

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.

My apolitical thought on this rainy January afternoon is this: Shatter in your own mind the prejudgments of popular culture, the grinning media dictates of who or what is in and who or what is out. Shatter also any notion of what you can and can’t do.

My daughter the artist. I spent the day at the art school she attends, sat in with the students doing oil painting – painted my first egg. The experience was a stunning exercise in the observation of light and shadow, and the instructor joyously allowed me to be a beginner. I was able to participate.

The physicist David Bohm and others have used the term “participatory consciousness,” which I take to mean the awareness that no truth is complete or solid or locked into place without us.

Participation at all the core levels of life is a primitive concept — primitive as in “primal,” not “less advanced” I think that’s why I’ve always been haunted by primitive masks and other artwork, because they betoken a world before the emergence of experts, a world of far less division of labor, a world in which all adults took part in decisions of collective survival. I say this not to romanticize earlier eras or to cry for an impossible step backwards, but to suggest that maybe modernity has lost something that is reclaimable: each individual’s fundamental and direct relationship with the nameless sacred, whatever that is.

A certain raw wonder — unfiltered, unexplained, inviting our participation the way wet snow invites a child’s eager hands to roll it, pack it, make it into something — is at the center of our world-in-progress. The arts and politics, the creation of our collective future, are sacred endeavors at both the personal and the collective level. The future shouldn’t be owned and controlled by others. But our media have reduced the world they mirror back to us to just that.

I think now about the rarified and celebrity-saturated arts. We are all artists. Just as every child is an artist, so is every adult. “But of course art is also survival,” I wrote some years ago, talking about an organization I have been a part of for many years called the Men’s Art Forum. “We know this. A few of the extraordinarily talented among us are richly celebrated and rewarded, as though they’ve been ordained to make art on behalf of all the rest of us — to sing our songs for us, to forge our visions, to tell us who we are. Taking nothing away from the brightest stars in the human sky, I long for a world that gushes less before great talent, accepts it and honors it, but sees it as no more than the lifeblood that courses in all of us.”

A society saturated in hierarchical judgment, which limits its members’ creative expression, reducing most people to the status of spectators, is starving itself to death.

What I know is this: Another person’s awakening is my awakening. When I think about “the arts” and what matters and what is valuable, I think about the stick-figure story told by a man named Darrel at our first Men’s Art Forum retreat some years ago.

“In the presence of your art, from the bottom of my soul, I feel . . .”

The core of the weekend was often an extended drawing exercise, and we’d begin a discussion of the drawings afterwards with those words. This broke any tendency to be judgmental and superficial.

At that first retreat, the exercise was: Draw the river of your life.

Beyond that, instructions were minimal.

The drawings took up much of the morning. We had lots of material available: crayons and Cray-Pas, charcoal, Magic Markers. The idea was, draw deep and real. Look at where you came from and what made you who you are today. See what you haven’t seen before. Those who were skilled at drawing were encouraged to draw with their opposite hand, to short-circuit their sense of control, to force them into a part of the brain ungoverned by an imposed sense of aesthetics. Draw deep and real.

Afterward each artist talked about his “river.” When we came to Darrel’s drawing, gathering around it in a semicircle, he started pointing to the figures along the winding river. This is Mom. This is Dad. “This is Mom at the divorce hearing. She’s sitting next to me. She has her hand on my thigh, her nails clamped into it. She’s not going to let me go, but I tell the judge I want to live with my dad.” The words came out slowly, haltingly — a clotted river of emotion, at times too much for him, but he went on, breaking into torrential tears. We listened. We supported him. We held him.

The work of art doesn’t end at the paper, it begins there. We lifted Darrel and carried him outside and sat around the bonfire. Someone had his drawing. He tore it into pieces and threw it into the fire.

It seems to me we’ve barely begun to understand what it means to participate in our own psychology, our own history, our own lives.

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.

It’s OK to kill your enemy, but not to urinate on him, at least not after he’s dead.

The latest scandal of the war on terror — the release of the video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of two dead Afghanis (“Have a good day, buddy”) — has turned the game of geopolitics downright surreal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, exercising code-red damage control, said the men may be guilty of a war crime. Official condemnation of the act has been far swifter and more severe than the routine statements issued by Pentagon spokespersons after the mere bombing of a village and the deaths of disputed numbers of women and children. There were no press releases dismissing the incident because the desecrated Afghanis were insurgents.

It was almost as though, in the game of war, where nothing is sacred except the supremacy of power — winning — this is where power stops and humanity begins: You must respect your enemy’s dead body. It says so right there in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

However, upon reflection, it seems to me that, in all likelihood, in an era where positive spin is crucial to a successful war effort, the official stand in defense of the dignity of corpses may not be in deference to morality so much as public relations. If skewering the head of one’s enemy on a pike furthered a political end, official “thou shalt not” morality would manage to find a loophole for such behavior (it’s for the greater good), and the nation’s ultimate moral stand would retreat even further into obscurity and irrelevance.

My point is this: Morality is no match for the need to win, for the culture of domination. And the moral bedrock of civilization is nothing but sandstone.

This is not a plea for sterner morality but for a shift away from domination mentality, whether at the personal, the corporate or the geopolitical level — or at least for public awareness of the price we pay when we build a nation around the endless defeat of enemies, real and imagined.

“When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”

The quote is from a breezy Associated Press story about the urination incident, putting corpse desecration into context. The speaker is a Marine lieutenant “who teaches the law of war to Marines before they are sent off to Afghanistan.” His point is that we shouldn’t judge these men too harshly.

The point is made with more vehemence further down in the story, when the reporters quote a Vietnam vet who sneers at the public’s “naïveté” about war: “I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies,” he said. “We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge.”

It’s just part of the time-honored tradition of war, from Achilles and Hector onward through the bloodstained millennia. The AP story reads like the shadow version of the speech President Obama gave at Fort Bragg last month, announcing the shutdown of the Iraq operation: “You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries . . .”

When war is merely upcoming — with Iran, for instance — we talk about it with matter-of-fact abstraction and, of course, urgency. Gotta do it now or . . . or . . . Iran will become a member of the nuclear club, and then there will be hell to pay. And then we go to war and there is, indeed, hell to pay, but we pay it with a shrug and the unspoken words: What did you expect? “When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”

Such quotes, however, did not accompany the recent stories about another former Marine, 23-year-old Itzcoatl Ocampo, who served in Iraq in 2008 and was arrested last week for the murders of four homeless men in Anaheim and Yorba Linda, Calif.

Ocampo, by all accounts, suffered not only serious and untreated PTSD related to his military service, but had this condition compounded by poverty. “After he left active duty in 2010, Ocampo returned to Orange County to find his father living under a bridge,” according to a KTLA-TV report. His father was homeless! He loved his father. He started stalking and murdering homeless men — desecrating their corpses with 40 or more stab wounds — and even showed a picture of one of his victims to his father, warning him of the dangers of the street.

The psychology here is over the edge, but “when you ask young men to go kill people for a living . . .”

Let us stop shrugging off the madness of war — and I mean that term literally. We try to contain this madness with crisp rhetoric, discipline and honor codes, but human psychology will have none of that.

As Matthis Chiroux, an Afghan vet and war resister, pointed out recently in an excellent essay, the phenomenon of “war porn” — the photographic record of desecrated corpses — is widespread within the ranks and aggravated by our long, slow defeat in the war on terror: our inability to impose our will on a living enemy. “Historically, defeated or nearly defeated armies have been guilty of some of the most serious atrocities,” Matthis writes.

When the glory of victory eludes us, we can only impose our will on corpses.

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.

A fascinating story in the New York Times just after Christmas showed this persistence unfolding before our very eyes.

The sale of arms to Iraq (remember Iraq?) — $11 billion worth of almost everything, fighter jets, battle tanks, cannons, armored personnel carriers, armor and helmets, even sport utility vehicles — is going to move forward even though it makes little sense from multiple points of view, including U.S. geopolitical interests. As far as I can tell, the sale is going to go through because “war persists” — or something persists, a force invisible to reporters and beyond the control of diplomats (at least those who speak on the record).

“The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale . . .” the Times informs us, “despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.”

Well, so much for democracy. So much for talking about anything noble. Excuse me if I seem to be speaking as though I’m surprised. The only thing that surprises me is how quickly and thoroughly our pretenses disintegrate once we’re done with them, and how baldly we get on with business as usual. Or rather, business as usual gets on with us.

Miliki’s agenda is to cut the Sunnis out of the government, and the Iraqi military has “evolved into a hodgepodge of Shiite militias more interested in marginalizing the Sunnis than in protecting the country’s sovereignty,” creating conditions ripe for civil war, which the arms sale would grease. Well, moral concerns always play second fiddle in these matters.

But the Times also notes that even the amoral interests of American empire barely come into play in this done deal: “While the United States is eager to beef up Iraq’s military, at least in part as a hedge against Iranian influence, there are also fears that the move could backfire if the Baghdad government ultimately aligns more closely with the Shiite theocracy in Tehran than with Washington.”

The article goes on to inform us that the American embassy in Baghdad, specifically its Office of Security Cooperation, is the focal point of the effort to arm Iraq’s military. The office “serves as a broker between the Iraqi government and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.”

And the dark force begins to reveal itself. At this late stage of the American republic, military-industrial corruption permeates not only our foreign policy but our ideals. We go to war because the business of war is beyond all constraint.

“In a striking departure from the ideological preferences of the post-Vietnam Democratic Party, President Barack Obama has made overseas arms sales a pillar of U.S. foreign policy,” Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, a D.C. think tank, wrote — uncritically — for Forbes last week.

Indeed, “What the president and his advisors have figured out is that, unlike sending troops to fight overseas, there is almost no downside to sending weapons.”

Discussing the Obama administration’s recently announced $30 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia (atop last year’s $60 billion deal), he points out, without any sort of irony, that “Boeing assembles the F-15 fighters at the center of the deal in Missouri, and General Electric will build the engines in Ohio. Both are swing states whose Electoral College votes could determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential race.”

A momentum of cynicism gets going here, and its cutting edge is: jobs. Back when Congress was voting its annual multi-billion-dollar appropriations to continue the Iraq war, the justification was always “to support the troops.” Similarly, our staggeringly large weapons deals are really job-creation deals, and how win-win for the president if he can create those jobs in swing states.

Of course, it’s not union shop stewards who sit on the Council of Foreign Relations or advise the White House on foreign policy. It’s the CEOs of the largest defense contractors who do that, and their companies walk away with annual earnings the size of Third World economies — and the execs make personal fortunes — by ensuring that war, any war, remains at the core of our foreign policy. It doesn’t even need to be in the national interest.

It makes me think about Murat Kurnaz, the German national who spent five years as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured and humiliated — chained to the ceiling of his cell, beaten, waterboarded — because suddenly he was a human being with no rights. After five years he obtained his release only because the German government got involved in his case and pressured the U.S. for his release.

He was a young student in Pakistan when he was pulled off a bus by police and turned over to U.S. authorities as a “terrorist.” He had no connection to the Taliban or al-Qaida, but that didn’t matter. Someone collected a $3,000 bounty on him. This is how the system works. This is the rationality of war. This is the morality of money.

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.

Every one of these rights is in jeopardy as 2012 opens and another presidential election season gets serious. But this is nothing new.

After all, democracy is nothing if not a perpetual nuisance to the powerful. It asserts that public policy is everyone’s business, and that the concerns of even the most financially and socially marginal citizens are equal to those of the most elite. Indeed, no one is marginal in a democracy — a concept we embrace as a nation but don’t believe. And thus citizens are marginalized all the time.

“Even in 2008, which saw the highest voter turnout in four decades,” Ari Berman wrote last September in Rolling Stone, “fewer than two-thirds of eligible voters went to the polls. And according to a study by MIT, 9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots that year because of problems with their voter registration . . . long lines at the polls . . . uncertainty about the location of their polling place . . . or lack of proper ID.”

Berman pinpoints two serious problems in this passage. The lesser of the two, though still immensely troubling, is the cheat factor: the placing of impediments in the way of vulnerable voters or the outright disenfranchisement of certain constituencies, by legal, quasi-legal or outright illegal means. The cheat factor can also refer to the actual manipulation of election results, something eerily easy to do on electronic voting machines — with evidence of widespread irregularities permanently tarnishing George Bush’s re-election in 2004, for instance.

This year, the democracy impeders are out in full force. The NAACP has issued a report called “Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America,” which, as reported by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis, “takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in fourteen states that are designed to keep minorities from voting in 2012.” The organization has petitioned the U.N. to investigate.

The most notorious of these tactics has been the proliferation of laws, usually passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, requiring would-be voters to present photo IDs at the polling place, allegedly to control “voter fraud” — a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives like Karl Rove to justify laws aimed at cutting voter turnout among typically Democratic constituencies. These constituencies — African-Americans, Latinos, the poor, the elderly — are far less likely than middle-class whites to have an ID such as a driver’s license. To obtain a state ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles requires a long wait and, possibly, the prior purchase of a birth certificate, which has been likened to a modern-day poll tax.

Other legislative impediments include new bureaucratic hurdles complicating voter registration drives, which, Berman reported, caused the League of Women Voters to shut down its registration efforts in Florida and may lead Rock the Vote, which signed up 2.5 million new voters in 2008, to do the same; and the disenfranchising of ex-felons, a disproportionate number of whom, thanks to an array of historical forces, are African-American or Latino. (Many people happening to bear the same name as ex-felons also got purged from election rolls in a number of states in recent elections.)

Beyond the cheat factor — the disenfranchisement of certain voters or the manipulation of results — American democracy is being hollowed out by a process, to my mind, even more insidious: the slow, steady usurpation of power by unelected special interests and the privatization of the commons. This process continues no matter who gets elected, because elected power is subordinate to it.

I still have dazzling memories of lines snaking around the block at Chicago polling places throughout Election Day 2008, as the Obama campaign mobilized hope and possibility in almost unprecedented numbers. But as Berman pointed out, even though this was the best turnout the country had in four decades, it represented less than two-thirds of eligible voters. Along with the 9 million people who tried to vote and for various reasons couldn’t in 2008, more than 40 million people marginalized themselves by not even trying.

This isn’t a problem of “laziness.” It’s more like pragmatic despair. The media do their best to trivialize the election process and turn it into a horse race. And the military-industrial economy, through organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, to which some 2,000 state legislators and hundreds of corporations (e.g., Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, AT&T) belong, quietly shapes legislation and wields political power on behalf of moneyed interests.

The good news is that, as we reclaim, anew, our right to vote, we counter organized, secret, unelected corporate power and regain our own. Real democracy is represented by citizen activism and, most spectacularly in 2011, the Occupy movement, which demonstrated that “voting” is something we do by our actions every single day.

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.

And the troops will be home for Christmas. Hurrah! Hurrah!

(The men will cheer, the boys will shout, and we’ll all feel gay, except maybe Rick Perry.)

“The war in Iraq will soon belong to history,” President Obama told the troops at Fort Bragg last week. “Your service belongs to the ages. Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.”

Maybe, as he fulfilled his campaign promise and shut down the Iraq operation after nearly nine years of occupation, slaughter and nation-wrecking, the president had no choice but to extol the glory of our fake values, to pretend — to those who fought it — that this was an honorable war, waged in self-protection and righteous vengeance.

Maybe, even if Barack Obama has a grand plan and does, as so many people believe, intend to change the national direction — to make compassion and honesty our primary governing values — he can only do so incrementally. He still has to, you know, humor the fist-pumpers and American exceptionalists. He still has to lie.

I don’t know.

I fear that the Big Lie is seductive, because there’s so much power attached to it. On the outside looking in, when you’re just a state senator from Illinois, or whatever, the invasion of Iraq may look like a dumb war. But on the inside of the operation, with so much power at stake, the pragmatic necessities of empire, a.k.a., our national interests — control of oil, dominance in the Middle East, the well-being of defense contractors — morph into patriotic values, and seem, all of a sudden, worth the cost in human lives, environmental devastation and even the well-being of future generations.

If there’s no such thing as a president who can tell the truth about a fraudulently launched, devastatingly counterproductive military adventure, or speak critically about militarism in general — because the truth would, oh, bring down the economy — we have an inadequate system of government, whose fundamental purpose is to resist change and perpetuate itself no matter what.

This is a problem. There may be no way to change such a system from the inside, which was clearly Barack Obama’s mandate, as well as his promise, when voters swept him into office, and the world cheered, in 2008.

The mistake the Obama constituency made was to believe that we can leave the details of change up to a designated leader. It’s not democracy that’s inadequate, but a system of representative government in which only the enormously wealthy, or those who have indentured themselves to moneyed interests, can cross the threshold into leadership positions. In such a system, those who oppose the interests of war and empire can’t possibly be represented. It is these interests that declare the Iraq war a success and, in so declaring, lay the groundwork for the next war and the continuation of the military-industrial economy, even in the face of the increasing pointlessness of war.

“Why is war in decline? For one thing, it no longer pays,” declared Steven Pinker and Joshua S. Goldstein in an op-ed in the New York Times last week. “For centuries, wars reallocated huge territories, as empires were agglomerated or dismantled and states wiped off the map. But since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force, and no member of the United Nations has disappeared through conquest.”

Their premise is that, despite appearances to the contrary, history is in the process of declaring war obsolete. This is an achingly slow process, with lots of backsliding, but trust us, they say, wealth now emanates more from trade than the control of land, and war only hurts trade. As prosperity increases and central governments grow stronger, War, the Apocalyptic horseman with the human face, rides off into the sunset.

While I agree with their historical assessment, I take issue with their implicit contentment to sit back, enjoy the prosperity, and let large, impersonal social forces do the job of eliminating war. I also disagree that trade itself has no use for war — not when we have a military-industrial economy that is committed to fresh wars against whomever or whatever looms next as a convenient enemy.

I think we’re caught in a paradoxical moment, when history’s long arc has indeed begun to swing away from the logic of brutal domination, but those in power still depend on it and seek to perpetuate it under cover of the Big Lie.

I urge the convening of a truth commission that refuses to sit and wait for history. We must have an honest accounting of this war that may have killed as many as a million Iraqis and helped wreck our economy even as it enriched a few powerful profiteers. A disastrous war may be over, but there’s no cause for cheering until we free our government from the interests that waged 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.

© 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

There are two types of Indian stereotypes, she said — the negative (the ignorant savage, the abductor of white women, etc.) and the romantic (woo-woo, New Agey, let’s play Indian, “go ’Skins!”) — and left it at that, implying, OK, if you are non-Native, the best attitude to strike is a certain respectful distance, neither denigrating the culture nor seizing hold of it like an idiot. If you want more, attend lectures and look at the artifacts on display behind glass cases, but DO NOT TOUCH.

This was all academic and sensible, the voice of the expert, an anthropologist, and given the history of the last 500 years — given colonialism, land grabs and boarding schools, given the genocide perpetrated by Western governments on every continent during and beyond the Age of Exploration — understandable, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, it’s just more cultural arrogance, a denial of the relevance of indigenous consciousness in the present moment.

The question I finally blurted out was: What’s beyond the stereotypes? What about the actual interaction between cultures? She shrugged. It happened in the 18th century, at least sporadically, she said, before American independence and the new nation’s systematic conquest of the continent.

Something inside me was pushing hard against her matter-of-fact expertise. What about in the 21st century? I asked. I didn’t, in that moment, have the words to articulate what I really meant: What about the flow of Earth-connected awareness from indigenous peoples to the planet-conquering, cluelessly arrogant West? Where is that happening? In any case, she shook her head. She didn’t see any significant cultural integration, any flow of values, happening anywhere, and seemed surprised that I asked.

This was about a month ago. I was reminded of the encounter the other day, when a New York Times story gleefully informed me that values are indeed flowing between the cultures, in the wrong direction, as Western belief in the sacredness of money, and the smallness of consciousness that accompanies money worship, infects tribal culture.

Specifically, the story examined how casino money has led to the phenomenon of tribal disenrollment — the casting out of lifelong members of casino-rich tribes, particularly in California — where in 2010 casinos on 60-some reservations took in over $7 billion.

According to the article, “The money and the immense power (casino income) has conferred on tribes that had endured grinding poverty for decades have enticed many tribal governments to consolidate control over their gambling enterprises by trimming membership rolls, critics and independent analysts say.”

California tribes have disenrolled at least 2,500 people over the past decade, alleging lack of authentic ancestry in that tribe — one more silent consequence of the Western genocide of previous centuries, when “dozens of tiny tribes . . . were decimated, scattered and then reconstituted.”

And now the disenfranchisement continues, often to devastating psychological as well as financial consequence for the disenrollees, who find themselves instantly stripped of their heritage by a legal document and sometimes forced, with their children, out of their homes.

Ironically, critics of the disenrollment trend are forced to appeal to the U.S. government, asking Congress to empower federal courts or the Bureau of Indian Affairs “to provide legal recourse to Indians who believe they have been disenrolled improperly.”

But this, of course, not only diminishes tribal autonomy, it also continues the process of shattering what was once whole into ever smaller shards of legal squabbling. The Times story evinced no awareness of indigenous values that are significantly different from Western values — who, after all, is going to question the sacredness of $7 billion? — and presented the dispute as just another struggle between aggrieved parties.

And whatever values that were once overarching in the indigenous worldview — the living universe, the connectedness of all living beings, the sacredness of place and relationship — retreat behind the glass case of historical curiosity.

In counterpoint to the casino story, I make note of the sawmill in northern Wisconsin owned and operated by Menominee Tribal Enterprises, which for decades has been incorporating sustainable forestry practices with its business operation, “balancing harvest with annual growth” and keeping the forest viable, a place for spiritual rejuvenation as well as a source of timber.

I also note that the global restorative justice movement — with its emphasis on honest communication and healing rather than punishment — emerged in indigenous communities in Northern Canada and New Zealand, and is now slowly catching on in, and transforming, crime-beset pockets of Western culture.

We’re skidding toward global economic and environmental collapse unless we can reclaim our shared humanity and rediscover our place in the circle of life — that is, embrace values bigger than money and power. I believe this is possible, but only with indigenous consciousness as our spiritual cornerstone.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces 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.

© 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

I’m thinking, wow, we power our society as much on adolescent energy as we do on fossil fuels. And the consequences are probably even more devastating.

The quote is a small moment in an excellent story in the New York Times the other day by John Branch called “A Brain Going Bad,” about the National Hockey League’s onetime premiere enforcer/tough guy, Derek Boogaard, who died last May at age 28 of an alcohol and painkiller overdose. His addiction to them was likely due to unrelieved, untreated brain trauma.

After his death, brain researchers discovered the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, an Alzheimer’s-like condition most likely caused by repeated blows to the head. Boogaard had become just one more used-up hero.

“More than 20 dead former NFL players and many boxers have had CTE diagnosed,” Branch wrote. “It generally hollowed out the final years of their lives into something unrecognizable to loved ones.”

But, Branch noted, the NHL does not acknowledge a link between hockey and CTE and is not about to end on-ice fighting, which of course is the source of the adrenalin — the adolescent energy — that maintains its fan base. Professional hockey may masquerade as a game, but, like all major league sports, it is first and foremost big business; the product it sells is vicarious thrills and a pseudo-military quest for hometown victory, all wrapped in a package of good old American values.

One of the most telling moments in Branch’s story was when the Minnesota Wild, the team with which Boogaard spent most of his career, paid a tribute to him after his death, in the form of a pregame film of his career highlights:

“The Wild had drafted Boogaard in 2001, groomed him to fight and paid him several million dollars over five seasons to be the NHL’s top enforcer. He punched his way to local adoration and leaguewide fear and respect.

“The tribute showed Boogaard running over opponents, smiling with fans and talking to children. It showed each of the three NHL goals he scored.

“It did not show a single punch.”

There’s a time to be vicious and a time to lie, and the lying is called propaganda. The lying is called bringing democracy to Iraq, or Afghanistan. The lying is called national defense and “support our troops.” Our moral integrity rests on a foundation of public relations — the assertion that wise and benevolent institutions (certainly not reckless ones, certainly not cowardly) are in control and maintaining the public good. And every so often the public is thrown something — the corpse of Osama, say — and the adolescent energy bursts forth in cries of “USA! USA!”

And it’s all good. Except . . .

“The U.S. Army is confronting an unprecedented suicide crisis. Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 1,100 soldiers have taken their own lives, with the numbers escalating each year for the last six years. (In 2010) alone, 301 soldiers committed suicide — a new record.”

We’re using up our heroes. Whatever we’re doing to the rest of the world, we’re also doing to ourselves. The statistics come from Stars and Stripes, the GI publication, which, in a series of articles in June, looked at the lives of some of those soldiers who committed suicide. Like Derek Boogaard, they had injuries to their brains — if not from physical trauma (though innumerable soldiers and vets suffer from such injuries), then the psychological kind, known as post-traumatic stress disorder — and these injuries hollowed out their lives, made them, at times, unrecognizable to loved ones.

“Friends and family members say the Army was more than happy to take (Jacob) Andrews when it needed new soldiers for an unpopular war,” writes Bill Murphy in Stars and Stripes, “but that it punished and abandoned him when he returned from Afghanistan, despite clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and possible traumatic brain injury.”

Andrews, who got into trouble due to his drinking, was given a general discharge in the midst of his re-enlistment — and the Army was then done with him, except to hound him to pay back $11,000 of his re-enlistment bonus. He was never examined or treated for PTSD, never given the least bit of official understanding for troubled behavior. Despite his service, he was denied honors or benefits. He finally hanged himself earlier this year in a wooded area near his parents’ house in Kansas City, becoming “part of the grimmest military statistic of modern times: one of the 18 U.S. veterans, on average, who commits suicide each day.”

Violence is a toy we play with as a culture, a commodity we sell. And the heroes born of violence, created in adolescent enthusiasm — “punch me, Boogeyman” — are subject to the same dehumanization process as our designated enemies. PTSD is an injury of human beings, not heroes, and the only treatment for it is growing up.

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

© 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.