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	<title>Common Wonders</title>
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	<description>Co-creating a culture of peace</description>
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		<title>Happy Savages</title>
		<description><![CDATA[“Thirty seconds to zero . . . six, five, four, three, two, one.”

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.

]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/world/happy-savages/</link>
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		<title>The Barbara Tree</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My daughter went jogging to the lake. When she came back, she reported: “Dad, someone hung a bird in the Barbara tree.”

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.
]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/peace/the-barbara-tree/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Transforming Troubled Schools</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What happened?

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?
]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/peace/transforming-troubled-schools/</link>
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		<title>Works in Progress</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’m sitting in my daughter’s Baltimore apartment thinking about works in progress. This city is a work in progress and its pockets of vibrancy delight me, partly because, like my own hometown, Detroit, it is too frequently written off in the national mindset as broken, dying — above all, an undesirable place to live.

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.

]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/peace/works-in-progress/</link>
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		<title>The Dignity of Corpses</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Civilization hasn’t successfully drawn a moral border at the sanctity of human life itself, but because it needs to put some limit on human behavior, it has, apparently, taken a last stand at the dignity of corpses.

It’s OK to kill your enemy, but not to urinate on him, at least not after he’s dead.
]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/world/the-dignity-of-corpses/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>A Momentum of Cynicism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[But no matter how futile, repulsive or dysfunctional war may be,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book Blood Rites, “it persists.”

A fascinating story in the New York Times just after Christmas showed this persistence unfolding before our very eyes.

]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/world/a-momentum-of-cynicism/</link>
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		<title>The Hollow Democracy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Maybe they’re trying to remind us that democracy isn’t merely a matter of casting that little vote once every Leap Year — but, far, far more significantly, it’s about getting that right to vote in the first place, keeping that right, and having it matter.

Every one of these rights is in jeopardy as 2012 opens and another presidential election season gets serious. But this is nothing new.

]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/society/the-hollow-democracy/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The Big Lie Marches on</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the prime motivator of all our military action.

And the troops will be home for Christmas. Hurrah! Hurrah!

]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/world/the-big-lie-marches-on/</link>
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		<title>The Spiritual Jackpot</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The topic was “Indians of the Midwest” and the professor was knowledgeable and conveyed serious respect for Native culture, but something kept gnawing at me as she talked.

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.
]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/eco/the-spiritual-jackpot/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Used-up Heroes</title>
		<description><![CDATA[At a sports bar in downtown Minneapolis called Sneaky Pete’s, “Young men fueled with alcohol begged Boogaard to punch them, so they could say they survived a shot from the Boogeyman.”

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.
]]></description>
		<link>http://commonwonders.com/world/used-up-heroes/</link>
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