Think of the mini-security state as an ironic projection of NATO’s own agenda, which is control — by force — of as much of the world as possible. And of course the propaganda that accompanies the big show is that the protesters are the dangerous and disruptive ones, that NATO’s violence is distant, necessary and somehow clean, despite the occasional awkward headline (“NATO Admits Killing Afghan Mother, 5 Children in Air Strike”).

What the protesters really represent is what NATO, and all the forces of empire and domination, fear most: the impertinence to question and challenge authority and demand a say at the big table.

“The nonviolent resister has a deep faith in the future, and believes that the forces in the universe are ultimately on the side of justice. To quote Dr. King, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

NATO, on the other hand, has no faith whatsoever in the future, beyond that miniscule segment it thinks it can control by total and overwhelming force. It’s losing the war in Afghanistan but needs to demonstrate it hasn’t lost the one on its own turf — though by defining it as a war it has already lost.

The words quoted above are part of the nonviolence statement at the Voices for Creative Nonviolence website, some of whose members and friends — including Nobel Peace nominee Kathy Kelly — are in the process of walking some 200 miles from Madison, Wis., to Chicago in response to the upcoming NATO summit. I joined them this past weekend on Wisconsin’s Glacial Drumlin Trail, put in about ten miles with them and shared — oh, the joy! — a burst of serious rain with them on Sunday. I got soaked. Everyone got soaked.

Creative nonviolence! Walking in the rain has become part of my definition of what this term means. Indeed, just walking along a trail in calm pursuit of the seemingly impossible — from Helenville to Sullivan to Dousman to Wales to Waukesha, and when the trail ends, more walking, through Milwaukee and south to Chicago, through 25 towns and cities — is empowering in ways that defy logic. If nothing else, it breaks one’s sense of isolation and helplessness, which begins with the question: How can I possibly make a difference?

“This is where you get the energy for the next 20 miles — one person ‘out there’ you connect with,” said Jules Orkin, one of the walkers.

Walking for a cause is building community. It’s also being part of a community. As Jules and I talked, somewhere between Dousman and Wales, it was already starting to rain. I felt a familiar, habitual dismay at the first few drops, an “oh no,” as though the fun were over, but the conversation was getting so good I ignored the feeling.

“I’ve averaged over a thousand miles a year,” Jules said. Walking, that is, to end war, to demand justice for Native Americans, to challenge nuclear power and weapons. This summer he will walk from Nagasaki to Hiroshima, arriving in Hiroshima on Aug. 6. He’s 73. He turns 74 in August.

Did you ever walk along the moral arc of the universe?

Along with Jules and Kathy, my fellow walkers last weekend were Buddy Bell, who coordinated the walk; Alice Gerard from western New York; Kathy Walsh from Madison; and Barbara Hoffman, from Appleton, Wis. Some were vets in taking a nonviolent stand for the future.

“I’ve spent 15 months in federal prison,” Alice told me. She’s been sentenced three times, once for three months, twice for six months — for crossing the line at Fort Benning, Ga., during the annual protests at what was once called the School of the Americas. For decades, Latin American military personnel, in service to the American empire, received training there in torture and other methods of keeping impoverished populations in check. She’s been arrested for protesting, in total, 14 times — spurred to activism after her friend, Sr. Diana Ortiz, was kidnapped and brutally tortured in Guatemala.

“At that point, it ceased to be an abstract concept — the reality of somebody I knew being tortured helped push me across the line,” Alice said.

And so we walked in the rain. We walked to stand in moral opposition to the NATO drone strikes and night raids. We walked to stand against the Strategic Partnership Agreement, recently signed by Presidents Obama and Karzai in secrecy and in the absence of public debate or input, which, after 11 years of devastating war and occupation, will keep a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan for another decade.

We walked to take all this and more out of the realm of abstraction, to build community and to acknowledge that the only future worth creating is one that bends toward justice.

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.

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?

I’ve been staring at the words for hours now:

“This terrible incident does not change our steadfast dedication to protecting the Afghan people and to doing everything we can to build a strong and stable Afghanistan.” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their entire community.” — deputy American ambassador to Afghanistan, James B. Cunningham

The words are meant to soften this PR disaster, to muffle the cries of the survivors.

“And obviously what happened this weekend was absolutely tragic and heartbreaking. But when you look at what hundreds of thousands of our military personnel have achieved under enormous strain, you can’t help but be proud generally.” — President Barack Obama

But all they do is cascade like an avalanche of sludge down from the highest reaches of American empire. The 24-7 news media report that villagers are “angry” and the “already strained relationship between Washington and Kabul” has been “inflamed.” And 16 villagers in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province — nine of them children — are shot dead in their homes, many while sleeping, their deaths blending into the thousands, the millions, of Afghans and Iraqis slaughtered, displaced, starving and poisoned, mostly anonymously, in the 11 years of the “war on terror,” the war on sanity and innocence.

These 16 deaths stand out, eliciting searing headlines and bland, Hallmark-greeting-card apologies from on high, because they were perpetrated by an insane man in a soldier’s uniform, acting on strictly internal orders. They were sensational: the work of another lone-nut gunman. This is what grabs the headlines.

But the horror most people feel at these particular murders is not a function of their lone-nuttiness but just the opposite. At some deep level, the terror gnaws at us: These murders are not simply the result of national policy. They are national policy, in all its cruel, exploitative lunacy.

This is the emperor with no clothes.

The soldier who killed the villagers acting on his own warped orders was part of the human wreckage of the empire he served. Before deploying to Afghanistan in December, he served three tours in Iraq, which almost certainly means he had PTSD — cancer of the spirit — and it was in the process of eating him alive.

His home base, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Wash., was designated the most troubled outpost in the U.S. military by Stars and Stripes, the independent military newspaper, because of its horrific suicide rate — over 20 in the last two years — and because of other convicted killers who were stationed there, most notoriously the four members of “the kill team” who hunted random Afghanis for sport and wore body parts as trophies. They were convicted in 2010.

But the most telling scandal to hit the base, hoisting the most glaring red flag, is the one about the overturned PTSD diagnoses. Since 2007, according to the Washington Post, about 300 such diagnoses have been incorrectly downgraded at the base medical center to lesser conditions, allowing those soldiers to be redeployed and relieving the military of responsibility for treatment and long-term care. The situation caused such an uproar that the Army Medical Command opened an investigation last month and the head of the medical center was placed on administrative leave. My guess is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

American geo-policy is a self-perpetuating system that values human life as much as it values local and global ecosystems, which is to say, not at all. It cynically uses up the men and women who serve it militarily, then discards them as easily as it turns civilians into collateral damage in strategic bombing runs.

And PTSD is a tedious nuisance to the military high command. Vets have been complaining for years that they can’t get proper treatment for their psychological and spiritual wounds. In the documentary On the Bridge, which I wrote about last week, ex-Marine Ryan Endicott put it this way:

“You go to the chaplain, who tells you Jesus will save your soul if you accept him. Then you see the wizard — the battalion psychiatrist. He medicates you and gets you out the door. That’s it. I never had anyone to talk to. When I did try to talk, I was told to take more medication.”

The military-industrial machine, the engine of empire, is the ultimate debaser of human life. It spews death and public relations at an almost equal rate, and mostly the death blends into the PR and becomes regrettable, even tragic, but always necessary, always for the greater good.

Meanwhile, the spiritual cancer of PTSD is spreading. It’s as much American policy as the occupation of resource-rich and strategically useful nations.

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 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.