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# Common Wonders

Co-creating a culture of peace

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## Posts

- ['The Enemy Is Not a Human Being'](http://commonwonders.com/the-enemy-is-not-a-human-being/) - By Robert C. Koehler There’s a crucial, overlooked aspect of Daniel Ellsberg’s legacy that’s very much worth saluting, you might say: his transformation from a believer in the Vietnam war to a horrified opponent of it, ready to risk prison time to bring classified truth about its pointlessness into public awareness. Ellsberg, who died on
- [JFK and 'Peace for All Time'](http://commonwonders.com/jfk-and-peace-for-all-time/) - By Robert C. Koehler Was he kidding? Are these words for real? “I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.” This was sixty years ago:
- [Make America Racist Again](http://commonwonders.com/make-america-racist-again/) - By Robert C. Koehler Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again – making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority. This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior
- [United Humanity: A Future Beyond War](http://commonwonders.com/united-humanity-a-future-beyond-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians – dead children – are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all. How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details
- [Where Does Indifference to Life Begin?](http://commonwonders.com/where-does-indifference-to-life-begin/) - By Robert C. Koehler What does mowing the lawn have to do with world events? Well, one of my life skills is the ability to make minimal and possibly absurd connections, linking the trivial and the profound. Thus, a few years back (when I still mowed my own lawn), I wrote this poem. It’s called
- [Do You Believe in Them Yet?](http://commonwonders.com/do-you-believe-in-them-yet/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Do you believe in them yet?” Well, do you? Do I? I tear these words loose from my not-so-recent past – indeed, 27 years ago – when my wife was dying of pancreatic cancer. I think they mean something, but God knows what. I plunked that question in my journal on
- [Sanctuary Cities and International Security](http://commonwonders.com/sanctyary-cities-and-international-security/) - By Robert C. Koehler As Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants – “the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized – much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on. The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him),
- [This Old House . . .](http://commonwonders.com/this-old-house/) - By Robert C. Koehler Forty years. That’s how long I’ve been here – quietly bonding with this old house, becoming it, you might say, as I clunk up the stairs every day with a cup of coffee and plop down in front of my computer. My wife and I had been married two years when
- [Earth Day Is the Planet's Future](http://commonwonders.com/earth-day-is-the-planets-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision. We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving
- [There's No Real Future Without Empathy](http://commonwonders.com/theres-no-real-future-without-empathy/) - From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us , , , welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded, white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values – e.g., the Declaration of
- [Election Theft in the Context of Racism](http://commonwonders.com/election-theft-in-the-context-of-racism/) - By Robert C. Koehler As the Trump presidency digs its claws into the country – winner take all! – I look on in terrified amazement as he begins arrogantly instituting what can only be called his plan to devolve America back to the good old days: back to the era of Jim Crow certainty and
- [Everything That Doesn't Matter](http://commonwonders.com/everything-that-doesnt-matter/) - By Robert C. Koehler I need some help here. The Trump presidency and the “America only” future he’s hawking to the public like the world’s most arrogant snake-oil salesman feels beyond my ability to address right now, even though I consider doing so my life’s work. But sometimes the news of the day simply feels
- [A Little Mix of Money, Poetry and God](http://commonwonders.com/a-little-mix-of-money-poetry-and-god/) - By Robert C. Koehler As I stumble into my later years, I seem to know less and less. And I find myself – often in desperation – pulling what I think of as my childhood rabbit out of its hat. That is to say, when the conversation seems to be drifting away from me and
- [Growing Up with Fear and Self-Awareness](http://commonwonders.com/growing-up-with-fear-and-self-awareness/) - By Robert C. Koehler When I write about personal matters, I quickly stumble into one of life’s puzzling ironies: Every one of us is unique, and we’re also part of a collective whole. Self-awareness essentially means straddling that divide. This thought came up for me in the past week, when I started doing my best
- [Freedom of Speech: Keeping Sanity Alive](http://commonwonders.com/freedom-of-speech-keeping-sanity-alive/) - By Robert C. Koehler Freedom of speech is kind of like eggs nowadays – too expensive! For Columbia University, the cost imposed on it by the Trump administration was suddenly $400 million in rescinded federal funding, at least if the speech was pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel. What choice did the school have, except, as
- [The Journey Beyond Nukes Begins with an Apology](http://commonwonders.com/the-journey-beyond-nukes-begins-with-an-apology/) - By Robert C. Koehler When the powerful speak, mushroom clouds emerge – oh so easily. Power is about conquest; winning the war, getting what you want no matter the cost. For instance, Israel should nuke Gaza. “Do whatever you have to do.” Thus declared Sen. Lindsey Graham last year in a Meet the Press interview,
- [Look Your Best – We're Coed](http://commonwonders.com/look-your-best-were-coed/) - By Robert C. Koehler The “old days” are more alive than ever – by which I mean my old days, when I was a kid. My life pushed forward on its own, more or less. This is called growing up. I wasn’t paying much attention until, at a certain point, a.k.a., adolescence, I started noticing
- [Do We Need an Enemy To Know Ourselves?](http://commonwonders.com/do-we-need-an-enemy-to-know-ourselves/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.” The words are from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (where else?), explaining the root causes of a dystopian world. The book may be a work of fiction, but his words
- [Peltier's Release, a Nation's Healing](http://commonwonders.com/peltiers-release-a-nations-healing/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man I helped put behind bars.” Thus begins one of the most stunning letters I have ever read, written almost four years ago by former U.S. Attorney James
- [Closing Gitmo in the American Heart](http://commonwonders.com/closing-gitmo-in-the-american-heart/) - By Robert C. Koehler Gitmo, of course!! It’s the freest place “we” have – by which I mean the American government, a.k.a. Donald Trump. No rules apply there, be they international humanitarian law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s a dumping ground, a black hole. It’s the most secure place for America to hold, as Trump
- [War Unites Us in Hell](http://commonwonders.com/war-unites-us-in-hell/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’” “Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into
- ['All They Will Call You Will Be Deportees'](http://commonwonders.com/all-they-will-call-you-will-be-deportees/) - By Robert C. Koehler And now Trump consciousness purports to claim – or reclaim – control over America: the land of white Christian nationalists and no one else, damnit! But of course that level of selfishness – mine, mine, mine! – is only possible to maintain with a huge helping of fear alongside it: fear
- [Transcending Muturally Assured Insanity](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-muturally-assured-insanity/) - By Robert C. Koehler Uh oh, nukes coming in. Should we retaliate? This strikes me as the stupidest question a human being could ask – and, just possibly, also the last. Our enemy of the moment is loosing hell on us (if warning signals are accurate), so let’s do the same back at them. If
- [A World's Soul in Tatters](http://commonwonders.com/a-worlds-soul-in-tatters/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I left you for God, Daddy.” Let those words resonate across the planet. The speaker is Yahya Al-Batran, a Palestinian man – a dad – imagining the words his newborn son would have said. The boy, Jumaa, froze to death in the family’s tent. The infant had a twin brother who
- [Finding a Cure for Humanity's Cancer](http://commonwonders.com/finding-a-cure-for-humanitys-cancer/) - By Robert C. Koehler I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide). From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news – from Gaza, from all
- [Growing Up Means Claiming Your Own Mind](http://commonwonders.com/growing-up-means-claiming-your-own-mind/) - By Robert C. Koehler Dig, ponder, dig some more. A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up – not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m . . .
- [Return of 'Kids for Cash' and a Look Within](http://commonwonders.com/return-of-kids-for-cash-and-a-look-within/) - By Robert C. Koehler More than fifteen years after the “kids for cash” scandal shocked the nation, it’s back, stirring not just public incredulity but, for some, soul-slicing memories of hell on Earth. This is thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to Michel Conahan, one of two juvenile-court judges in Luzerne County. Pennsylvania,
- [Our Right To Sing — and Create the Future](http://commonwonders.com/our-right-to-sing-and-create-the-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right? I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what
- [Tearing Down Our Emotional Walls](http://commonwonders.com/tearing-down-our-emotional-walls/) - By Robert C. Koehler War, war and more war. It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics —
- [Loving Life, Honoring Roe](http://commonwonders.com/loving-life-honoring-roe/) - By Robert C. Koehler As Christian nationalism, the political right and Trump-mania seem to tighten their grip on the country, maybe now is the time for me to take a deep dig into the complex preciousness of . . . life itself. Hey, guess what? I’m “pro-life” — by which I mean, you know, pro-life
- [Post=Election: Bringing Hope Back to Life](http://commonwonders.com/postelection-bringing-hope-back-to-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler If you want to play the game of politics, here’s step one: Reduce everything to a linear political viewpoint: “right” or “left.” No matter how deep and large and complex that viewpoint is, politicize it, turn it into something that’s either right or wrong. It’s all about winning or losing. Did
- [Can Politics Merge with a Sane Future?](http://commonwonders.com/can-politics-merge-with-a-sane-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler “America is for Americans – Americans only!” The words are those of Stephen Miller, speaking last month at the infamous Madison Square Garden rally, but they define Donald Trump. This is the message – the cry from the mountaintop – he brought to the country . . . at least to
- [The Nation Just Lost the Election](http://commonwonders.com/the-nation-just-lost-the-election/) - By Robert C. Koehler I guess I’d call the Trump victory an “expected” shock. In the deepest core of my being, I was unhappy with virtually everything about the election: unhappy with the Kamala Harris campaign and her unrelenting support of Israeli genocide, unhappy with the Democratic Party and its contempt for progressive voters’ values
- [Creating Human Garbage](http://commonwonders.com/creating-human-garbage/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” This racist pseudo-joke, uttered by Tony Hinchecliffe at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, has been virally shamed. It’s even been
- [A Terrifying Choice Awaits Us](http://commonwonders.com/a-terrifying-choice-awaits-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler Early voting’s underway. My voting site is the Willye White Park fieldhouse, a mile north of where I live — a place I have enormous affection for, even though I only ever go there for one reason, every two years or so: to vote. It feels like a sacred ritual —
- [War's Victims Speak the Deepest Truth](http://commonwonders.com/wars-victims-speak-the-deepest-truth/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The past carries unforgettable trauma and pain across the land and among generations of refugees; yet we choose to transform victimhood into agency. We want to be the authors of our future.” Let these words resonate. In a sense, they’re all we have — if we oppose war and envision a
- [If Only Some Lives Matter, No Lives Matter](http://commonwonders.com/if-only-some-lives-matter-no-lives-matter/) - By Robert C. Koehler Colonialism is hardly a thing of the past – it’s alive and vibrant as ever . . . from the Middle East to Western Europe to the United States to India and God knows where else. And it can be profitable as hell, at least for the right industries. Be afraid.
- [The Fragments of the World Seek Each Other](http://commonwonders.com/the-fragments-of-the-world-seek-each-other/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.” These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from his book The Phenomenon of Man, may well be worth meditating on every day. The forces of . . . love?
- [Voting Beyond Our Pseudo-Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/voting-beyond-our-pseudo-democracy/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is it possible to expand the stakes of this election beyond the nation’s two-party pseudo-democracy? I have to write this. I have to express solidarity with all the other lost and torn voters out there, who are struggling with the question of the moment: Who should I vote for? Israel’s genocidal
- [Transcending the God of War](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-the-god-of-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The man suspected in the incident . . . camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, according to court documents filed Monday. He is accused of lying in wait for the former president before a Secret Service agent opened fire,
- [Who 'Won' the Debate?](http://commonwonders.com/who-won-the-debate/) - By Robert C. Koehler If nothing else, Donald Trump is forcing mainstream America out of its jailcell of clichés and political correctness – even though his apparent “vision” for America is primarily a dark comedy of lies. Yeah, I watched the debate. Was the Trump character played by Rodney Dangerfield? Maybe Don Rickles? He could
- [Defending Ourselves from Our Own Militarism](http://commonwonders.com/defending-ourselves-from-our-own-militarism/) - By Robert C. Koehler “As I said then, I say today, Israel had a right — has a right to defend itself.” This is militarism set in stone. The words are those of Kamala Harris, of course, in her extensive CNN interview last week – quick words that lead the charge and spew the glory,
- [Beyond the Cliches of State Is the Blue Pearl](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-the-cliches-of-state-is-the-blue-pearl/) - By Robert C. Koehler Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war? Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as
- [Countering the DNC: A Vigil for Gaza](http://commonwonders.com/countering-the-dnc-a-vigil-for-gaza/) - By Robert C. Koehler The Democratic National Convention was happening here in Chicago — my city — and I sat frozen at my desk, staring at my computer. Earlier in my life, yeah, I’d have gone down to the United Center, linked arms with the sane and outraged, joined the cry: Stop funding genocide! Instead,
- [Living — and Dying — in the Moment](http://commonwonders.com/living-and-dying-in-the-moment/) - By Robert C. Koehler I stroke the unknown . . . Bear with me as I finish my short walk. I was ambling through my neighborhood the other day, wielding a pair of walking sticks, “forcing myself,” you might say, to enjoy the beautiful afternoon but actually just plodding forward, in a hurry to get
- [Putting War and Peace on the Ballot](http://commonwonders.com/putting-war-and-peace-on-the-ballot/) - By Robert C. Koehler The corporate media report on elections — especially the biggie coming up — as though they were sporting events. If you win, hurray! You get the gold cup or whatever. The election process is a matter of shrewd strategy combined with, uh, likability. Thus, as per the New York Times: “Tim
- [Project 2025 and Some Poison Gas for the Future](http://commonwonders.com/project-2025-and-some-poison-gas-for-the-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler The right-wing Republicans . . . the Christian nationalists . . . have hoisted their flag: Project 2025, a.k.a., Project Hell on Earth, and it’s coming to a future near you. Or so they believe (and hope). But the Democrats are on our side! They won’t let it happen, right? While
- [Gratitude and Truth at the Rhubarb Lounge](http://commonwonders.com/gratitude-and-truth-at-the-rhubarb-lounge/) - By Robert C. Koehler In the morning, thank you, thank you In the evening, thank you, thank you In the middle of the day, thank you, thank you In the deep dark night, thank you, thank you Yeah, I’ll second that. The words are from the Sara Thomsen song “Rhapsody of Rest,” but more specifically,
- ['Got Any Tennis Balls?'](http://commonwonders.com/got-any-tennis-balls/) - By Robert C. Koehler Every bullet fired into a crowd penetrates the national soul — or so it seems to me, as I continue to grapple emotionally with the Trump-rally shooting in Butler, Pa. on July 13, which left one attendee murdered, several others wounded and the shooter himself dead. As with all such shootings,
- [Swatting at the Noose of Cynicism](http://commonwonders.com/swatting-at-the-noose-of-cynicism/) - By Robert C. Koehler As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it
- [Love Always Comes Out of Hiding](http://commonwonders.com/love-always-comes-out-of-hiding/) - By Robert C. Koehler . . . Your soul comes out of hiding. I understand that you are blessing me.. . . I find myself — still — groping in wonder. What a coincidence this was. About a week ago my friend Mike emailed me, telling me he and his wife had been going through
- [Assanges's Freedom Is Also Ours: To Tell the Truth](http://commonwonders.com/assangess-freedom-is-also-ours-to-tell-the-truth/) - By Robert C. Koehler After twelve years — including five years of solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison in London — Julian Assange is free. God bless America! He wasn’t extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, where he faced a sentence of 170 years in prison for violating the so-called Espionage Act. Instead, he took
- [If You Have a Problem, Kill It](http://commonwonders.com/if-you-have-a-problem-kill-it/) - By Robert C. Koehler The term is “banal militarism” – that is to say, violence and the preparation for violence so utterly commonplace that most people don’t even notice. Banal militarism is as American as apple pie. It’s also global in scope. As Richard Rubenstein writes: “Part of the reason for the relative immunity of
- [Power, Ego and Godliness](http://commonwonders.com/power-ego-and-godliness/) - By Robert C. Koehler OK, the big question: Should our country – USA! USA! – return to a place of godliness? Suddenly the nation’s stewpot of controversy started boiling over, thanks to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito being secretly recorded agreeing with a fake conservative at the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner last week. The
- [Is Abolishing War Possible?](http://commonwonders.com/is-abolishing-war-possible/) - By Robert C. Koehler If we can end, let us say . . . slavery — the legal “ownership” of other human beings — can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war? As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended
- [Voting for the Lesser Evil?](http://commonwonders.com/voting-for-the-lesser-evil/) - By Robert C. Koehler The election paradox looms. Do I calm myself down, steady my hand, pull the lever for Joe, even though it feels like voting for Netanyahu? Even though it feels like I’m loosing another bomb on Gaza? I’ve had a number of intense conversations with friends about this recently, the essence of
- [Welcome to the Beloved Community](http://commonwonders.com/welcome-to-the-beloved-community/) - By Robert C. Koehler We will not evolve into the future with closed minds. And nothing closes the human mind – either individually or collectively – like the weapons of war . . . and the freedom to use them. Step one: Dehumanize those you’re about to kill (i.e., accuse them of being who you
- [A World Under Spiritual Construction](http://commonwonders.com/3966-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler There’s something happening here . . . Consider, for instance, the recent announcement by Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia University, that it is divesting from “companies profiting from war in Palestine/Israel” – and, not only that, fully supports the student encampments (at Columbia and all across the country)
- [Cluster Bombs vs. Open Hearts](http://commonwonders.com/cluster-bombs-vs-open-hearts/) - By Robert C. Koehler Mine! Mine! Mine! Praise God . . . This is perhaps the worst thing human beings do: They take their deepest values — connection, love, empathy — simplify them down to a religion, a name (Christianity, let us say, or Judaism, or whatever) and suddenly they have a flag to wave
- [War, Money and Universities](http://commonwonders.com/war-money-and-universities/) - By Robert C. Koehler Peaceful protest, violent response – that says it all. Human politics – from global to local – remain mixed with hatred, dominance and . . . well, dehumanization. We’ve organized ourselves across the planet around one primary principle: the existence of an enemy. The division between “us” and “them” can be
- [The Humble Pen Takes on the Mighty Sword](http://commonwonders.com/the-humble-pen-takes-on-the-mighty-sword/) - By Robert C. Koehler Here’s an anniversary no one wants to celebrate: The Columbine school shooting — April 20, 1999 — just passed its 25th anniversary. Fifteen dead (including the two shooters), twenty-one injured. A new era begins . . . Why, why, why bring up such a horrific event? Perhaps because it hasn’t stopped.
- [The 'Accepted Insanity' of World War III](http://commonwonders.com/the-accepted-insanity-of-world-war-iii/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.” Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from
- [Survival Without Bombs or Borders](http://commonwonders.com/survival-without-bombs-or-borders/) - By Robert C. Koehler An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win! Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics — the souls in despair — tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once
- [No One Owns the Future](http://commonwonders.com/no-one-owns-the-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler Even the international condemnation of the Israeli devastation of Gaza often feels tepid. Consider, for instance, the words of U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in the wake of Israel’s April 1 drone strike on a convoy of cars from World Central Kitchen, a disaster relief organization bringing food to starving Gazans.
- [War and the Soul of Desperation](http://commonwonders.com/war-and-the-soul-of-desperation/) - By Robert C. Koehler I call it “naked insanity,” as in: the emperor has no clothes. He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom — not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons . .
- [Diversity in the Crosshairs](http://commonwonders.com/diversity-in-the-crosshairs/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital . . .” No, this is not the official “you are now entering Dearborn, Michigan” sign, at the corner of Michigan and Wyoming avenues, or whatever. This prosperous Detroit suburb — not only the hometown of Henry Ford but my hometown as well, the place
- [A One-State Solution Could Transform the World](http://commonwonders.com/a-one-state-solution-could-transform-the-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free. “Snort! No one wants this! It’s not possible — it’s not true!” My reply to the cynics is this:
- [Transcending Cultural Erasure](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-cultural-erasure/) - By Robert C. Koehler Oh Lord, kumbaya . . . As I absorb the daily news of war and global devastation, I sing these words to myself — quietly, yes, secretly, lest I ignite instant flash-bang sarcasm from the surrounding world. What next? A flower in a rifle barrel? Sarcasm spits in the face of
- [The Tears of War Belong to All of Us](http://commonwonders.com/the-tears-of-war-belong-to-all-of-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! You can kill as many of them as you want. Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job
- [Changing the World with Fire and Love](http://commonwonders.com/changing-the-world-with-fire-and-love/) - By Robert C. Koehler The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible. I’m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire — doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match
- [Struggling To Stay Positive — and Productive](http://commonwonders.com/struggling-to-stay-positive-and-productive/) - By Robert C. Koehler Excuse me as I ponder eternity — briefly. Like it or not, this is the essence of . . . uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “. . . once you actually hit it — that three letter word, ‘old’ — watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler
- [The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality](http://commonwonders.com/the-war-on-gaza-public-relations-vs-reality/) - By Robert C. Koehler For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us — the onlooking and supportive patriots — war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The reality of war should
- [Neck Deep in the Big Muddy](http://commonwonders.com/neck-deep-in-the-big-muddy/) - By Robert C. Koehler Read the news, hup, two, three, four! “Top United States officials prodded Israel on Monday to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip . . .” Thus began a recent, and oh so typical, piece of war reportage. It was purveyed by the New York Times but it’s something
- [The Need for Understanding Never Stops](http://commonwonders.com/the-need-for-understanding-never-stops/) - By Robert C. Koehler I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon. For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human
- [We're Still Moving 'Beyond Vietnam'](http://commonwonders.com/were-still-moving-beyond-vietnam/) - By Robert C. Koehler “And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.” Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I’m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His
- [The Cry of the Wounded: End War](http://commonwonders.com/the-cry-of-the-wounded-end-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I am begging the world: stop all the wars, stop killing people, stop killing babies. War is not the answer. . . .War is not how you fix things. This country, Israel, is going through horror. And I know the mothers in Gaza are going through horror. . . .” I
- [The Law of the Jungle: Our Teacher?](http://commonwonders.com/the-law-of-the-jungle-our-teacher/) - By Robert C. Koehler Perhaps the primary value of war – from the point of view of national leaders and their loyal followers – is that it places 100 percent of the blame for whatever’s wrong on the other guy: the enemy. And thus there’s no alternative but to kill “him,” which nowadays amounts to
- [Some Moments Never Go Away](http://commonwonders.com/some-moments-never-go-away/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Bobby come over!” I can feel the wind on my face, the gravel at my feet – oh so minutely, but with enough realness to pull me back seven decades, into one of the earliest moments of my becoming. For some reason I find myself, at
- [Poetry Bleeds from the Shattered Normal](http://commonwonders.com/poetry-bleeds-from-the-shattered-normal/) - By Robert C. Koehler What’s ordinary about life suddenly becomes sacred. This is my definition of poetry — my deepest plunge into being alive. It seems more relevant than ever, as innocent blood flows in the wars being waged by military-political bureaucracies across the planet. How many more stunned facial expressions will I see on
- [Takes One To Know One](http://commonwonders.com/takes-one-to-know-one/) - By Robert C. Koehler There are a number of blatant ways for terrorist organizations – by which I mean national governments – to justify committing mass murder. Once you start killing, it’s hard to stop. But you have to justify what you’re doing – a process humanity has been engaged in since the dawn of
- [Humanity's Bombs Are Aimed at Evolution](http://commonwonders.com/humanitys-bombs-are-aimed-at-evolution/) - By Robert C. Koehler In most media coverage of war — including the hell in the Middle East, where World War III looms —the unexamined assumption is that we, the readers, are spectators, looking on as the missiles fly (mostly in one direction) and Good dukes it out with Evil yet again, Paradoxically, Good and
- [Empathy for the Worst of Us](http://commonwonders.com/empathy-for-the-worst-of-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler . . . Why do I feel the urge to stroke the crime as though it were my child, to cup my hands around the horror and prevent it from going out? These words are a fragment of a poem I wrote a nearly a quarter of a century ago, after
- [Thankfulness Buried in the Rubble](http://commonwonders.com/thankfulness-buried-in-the-rubble/) - By Robert C. Koehler Much as I love Thanksgiving — seeing my family . . . oh the turkey, oh the cranberry sauce —I feel like maybe a bomb fragment has hit the “thanks” part. I find myself struggling to let a sense of thankfulness flow, because when I do — and doing so has
- [Turning Conflict into Music?](http://commonwonders.com/turning-conflict-into-music/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem? “. . . I came to understand the role some in the U.S. government have played to intentionally catalyze war, fueling arms sales globally, without regard for the consequences. The consequences are here! “We are cartwheeling towards a massive East v. West war with
- [Militarism vs. Our Shared Humanity](http://commonwonders.com/militarism-vs-our-shared-humanity/) - By Robert C. Koehler Sitting safely at my desk, looking at photos of bombed buildings and knowing that missing children are buried under the rubble, imagining (unavoidably) what this must feel like . . . oh my God, empathy gives way to horror. Move on, I tell myself. Write about something else. All wars are
- [Let's Stop Dehumanizing the Future](http://commonwonders.com/lets-stop-dehumanizing-the-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era. You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just
- [Igniting a Peace Fire, Even as War Rages](http://commonwonders.com/igniting-a-peace-fire-even-as-war-rages/) - By Robert C. Koehler Here’s some advice you probably never got about parenting: Write your child’s name on his or her leg or stomach, so that if — when — your building is bombed, the child can be identified when she’s pulled from the rubble. Apparently, mothers in southern Gaza are doing this now, as
- [Peace Means Embracing What We Fear](http://commonwonders.com/3850-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler “In the midst of our grief and pain, let’s remind each other who we are.” These are the words of Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She goes on: “We are people committed to tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. The Israeli government and U.S. government are
- [Hell Is Not Predestined](http://commonwonders.com/hell-is-not-predestined/) - By Robert C. Koehler Humanity’s cancer shows up in Israel and Palestine. Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands of people die, many of them (oh God, of course) children. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on
- [Hardening Ourselves into Weapons](http://commonwonders.com/hardening-ourselves-into-weapons/) - By Robert C. Koehler Something happened on Tuesday, as I began researching this column — I wound up having to give myself a COVID test. A good friend had just tested positive and, well, we had recently gotten together. I needed to see if I was OK. I note this not because there was bad
- [The Truth May Hurt, But We Still Have To Face It](http://commonwonders.com/the-truth-may-hurt-but-we-still-have-to-face-it/) - If the right gets its way, maybe in a decade or two, the United States will be free of its slave-owning past. All gone – gone with the wind. It’s just not taught anymore. Yeah, we had a civil war – about “states’ rights” – and then we moved on: We conquered the West, saved
- [Floating for Peace on the Golden Rule](http://commonwonders.com/floating-for-peace-on-the-golden-rule/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s 10 p.m. at Montrose Harbor in Chicago. Kiko and Tamar help me step from the dock into the wobbly rowboat. Kiko rows us out to the Golden Rule and I climb aboard in wonder. Oh my God! This is it – the 30-foot, anti-nuke sailboat with a history going back
- [Depleted Uranium Won't Bring Peace to Ukraine](http://commonwonders.com/3828-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler Freedom’s just another word for . . . blowing up your children? Giving them cancer? Militarism is obsolete, for God’s sake. Its technology is out of control. The latest shred of news that has left me stunned and terror-stricken is this, as reported by Reuters: “The Biden administration will for the
- [Creating Art: If It's Fun, It's Alive](http://commonwonders.com/creating-art-if-its-fun-its-alive/) - By Robert C. Koehler As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring. Art — what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it? That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire
- [Taking Life for Granted](http://commonwonders.com/taking-life-for-granted/) - By Robert C. Koehler Realizing that I’ve been taking something for granted — one grain of infinity — is never an abstraction. It generally happens by whack and wallop. Oh yeah, the knee. The knee. It’s kind of important. A crucial part of the realization process is acknowledgment. Maybe even learning something. So, pardon the
- [The Nuclear Apple](http://commonwonders.com/the-nuclear-apple/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The greatest danger to human civilization and the planet is the inability to believe that tomorrow can be different . . .” So writes Derek Johnson of the Global Zero movement, an organization committed to a world free of nuclear weapons. Let’s put it this way: If we can cooperate in
- [Water Is Life — for the Privileged](http://commonwonders.com/water-is-life-for-the-privileged/) - By Robert C. Koehler As the heatwave intensifies across the country, as workers exposed to the heat collapse on the job in increasing numbers — some of them die — Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has signed a law nullifying local ordinances in the state that require ten-minute heat and water breaks for those who
- [National Policy Wrapped in Razor Wire](http://commonwonders.com/national-policy-wrapped-in-razor-wire/) - By Robert C. Koehler “A 4-year-old girl passed out in 100-degree heat after she was pushed back toward Mexico by Texas National Guard personnel. A pregnant woman became trapped in razor wire and had a miscarriage. A state trooper said he was under orders not to give migrants any water.” Yes, these are scenes from
- [Facing Climate Change as One World](http://commonwonders.com/facing-climate-change-as-one-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . we need to do everything we can to keep (global) warming as low as possible.” When it comes to climate change, one two-letter word has me totally perplexed: “we.” There’s an implication of global unity — a transcendent “we,” marching as to war (so to speak) — facing
- [Listening to Oppenheimer, Seven Decades Later](http://commonwonders.com/listening-to-oppenheimer-seven-decades-later/) - By Robert C. Koehler A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy. Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of
- [Spare the Handcuffs, Spoil the Child](http://commonwonders.com/spare-the-handcuffs-spoil-the-child/) - By Robert C. Koehler A tiny piece of news out of Florida the other day poked me, you might say, in the rear end. The nation’s prison population — we’re number one! — expanded slightly, as did the concept of crime itself. A couple in Daytona Beach, Florida — two police officers — put their
- [It's Time To Stop the 'Insect Apocalypse'](http://commonwonders.com/its-time-to-stop-the-insect-apocalypse/) - By Robert C. Koehler I was reading about bumble bees recently — specifically, their looming demise, thanks to human greed and ignorance — and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We should have eaten from it! Well, we did, but then apparently upchucked everything we learned and, in the
- [Religion Pops out of Pandora's Box](http://commonwonders.com/religion-pops-out-of-pandoras-box/) - By Robert C. Koehler “One nation, under God . . .” Interesting addition to the Pledge, considering, you know, the separation of church and state. I actually remember it — it was 1954. I was in third grade, and had been reciting the Pledge with my classmates every morning for several years by then. I
- [Disconnecting War from Its Consequences](http://commonwonders.com/disconnecting-war-from-its-consequences/) - By Robert C. Koehler Twenty-two years ago, Congress put sanity up for a vote. Sanity lost in the House, 420-1. It lost in the Senate, 98-0. Barbara Lee’s lone vote for sanity — that is to say, her vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force resolution, allowing the president to make war
- [Creating a Cooperative World?](http://commonwonders.com/creating-a-cooperative-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Go back to where you came from.” This is basic American politics – what I might call spiritual ignorance: a dismissal of refugees fleeing war, famine and poverty as global sludge, clogging up our way of life. So many media stories about the border – our border – begin with an
- [Stepping over the Border, onto Planet Earth](http://commonwonders.com/stepping-over-the-border-onto-planet-earth/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . we belong to the Earth rather than to a nation . . .” These words stick in my heart like a wedding ring. They emanate a cutting glow, a crying wish and hope that slices to the core of me. At the same time, I feel surrounded by
- [Lost Souls with Nukes](http://commonwonders.com/lost-souls-with-nukes/) - By Robert C. Koehler More mass killings. More bloody “normal” — not just in Texas, not just in the United States, but around the world. Eerily, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott inadvertently reminded us of the international nature of this scourge when he referred to five recent murder victims, in a tweet announcing a $50,000 reward
- [Killing Our Way to the Truth](http://commonwonders.com/killing-our-way-to-the-truth/) - By Robert C. Koehler Hey China, quit threatening us! We’ll kick your ass. Yeah, bad China, maybe worse than Russia, e.g.: “The People’s Republic of China, which is increasingly challenging the United States economically, technologically, politically and militarily around the world, remains our unparalleled priority.” The words are those of Avril Haines, director of national
- [Love Thy Neighbor: A National Conversation](http://commonwonders.com/love-thy-neighbor-a-national-conversation/) - By Robert C. Koehler Can we form a circle big enough to fit 330 million Americans? Do we have enough folding chairs? I don’t know, but somehow we’ve got to launch a national conversation about . . . war, security, guns, fear and, oh God, the global future. Ultimately we need to pull the whole
- [Revisiting the Counterculture](http://commonwonders.com/revisiting-the-counterculture/) - By Robert C. Koehler When’s the last time you had your mind blown? Was this something that only happened in the 1960s? Well, I had my mind blown a few days ago, when I took part in a sort of reunion I could never have imagined. It wasn’t a “reunion” so much as a reopening
- [Mass Murder: Our Wounded Humanity](http://commonwonders.com/mass-murder-our-wounded-humanity/) - By Robert C. Koehler Once again . . . once again . . . once again . . . I’m sure you know what I’m referring to. Yeah, another — the latest (?) — mass shooting in the United States, this one at Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 10, two days ago
- [The Racists Return to Kindergarten](http://commonwonders.com/the-racists-return-to-kindergarten/) - By Robert C. Koehler Damn those Marxists! You know their game, right? They want to spew truth and real history at our kids. No doubt they’re also in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New
- [From Heaven to Bali: Taro's Journey](http://commonwonders.com/from-heaven-to-bali-taros-journey/) - By Robert C. Koehler “At school he was told he would never write . . .” Here was a kid – here was a man – who refused to listen to the authorities, and refused to be anything but fully human. And yeah, he could write. His spelling may have been iffy, but he could
- [Murder, and War, Begin with Dehumanization](http://commonwonders.com/murder-and-war-begin-with-dehumanization/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Chief Drake said it was too early to discuss a possible motive for the shooting, though he confirmed that the attack was targeted. The authorities were reviewing writings, and had made contact with the shooter’s father. . . .” Yeah, they’ll figure it out. The latest mass shooting: Six people dead,
- [Staying Woke: Revering Life](http://commonwonders.com/staying-woke-revering-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler This is from one of the people I’m least likely to bother quoting: “We need a national divorce. . . From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.” The words are those of our fellow American, Marjorie
- [Blowing Out the Candles in Iraq](http://commonwonders.com/blowing-out-the-candles-in-iraq/) - By Robert C. Koehler I read the news – invasion of Iraq! twentieth anniversary! – and struggle to transcend the abstraction of my remorse. A million killed? Half a million? The mortality stats vary depending on the source’s politics. But beyond the numbers looms an indifference that defines what is called “news.” “Today, 20 years
- [AI Robots Invade the Classroom — So What?](http://commonwonders.com/ai-robots-invade-the-classroom-so-what/) - By Robert C. Koehler The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots. They’re coming! Excuse me, they’re here. And they struck me as alien invaders, this recent manifestation of artificial intelligence on the Internet, which college students, high school
- [A Looming Book of Soul Fragments](http://commonwonders.com/a-looming-book-of-soul-fragments/) - By Robert C. Koehler Confession: I have a few books out there that no one knows about because I haven’t written them . . . well, finished them. I’ve talked in previous columns about “wrestling with infinity” — the match I always lose — by which I mean, picking a subject too large to reduce
- [Stirring Humor into 'Old Age'](http://commonwonders.com/stirring-humor-into-old-age/) - By Robert C. Koehler No doubt everyone grows old in their own way. But once you actually hit it — that three letter word, “old” — watch out: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .” So wrote William Butler Yeats, back in the last century, conjuring
- [Growing Up, Becoming a Man](http://commonwonders.com/growing-up-becoming-a-man/) - By Robert C. Koehler I’ve made my own choices along the path of life — spiritual, mental, physical. I declared myself a non-believer in my parents’ religion at age 16. I’d just read the book Exodus, by Leon Uris, and couldn’t tolerate the church’s teaching that all non-believers, including all Jews, were going to hell.
- [Making Our Schools Safe for Propaganda](http://commonwonders.com/making-our-schools-safe-for-propaganda/) - By Robert C. Koehler Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking? As Ron DeSantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public-school classrooms and libraries, where the innocent
- [Uh Oh, Here Comes the Occupying Army](http://commonwonders.com/uh-oh-here-comes-the-occupying-army/) - By Robert C. Koehler America, America . . . God kicks thee in the head. The twisted irony here — the irony of the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee last month — is that his killers were the ones hired and trained to keep the city safe. Instead, they created half an
- [Disarming, and Empowering, Lost Souls](http://commonwonders.com/disarming-and-empowering-lost-souls/) - By Robert C. Koehler I had a passing moment of wonder the other day – as I read about the latest . . . you know, mass shootings. Troubled souls with guns. Big problem. My thought was simply this: What if . . .? And then I lapsed into uncertainty. What if . . .
- [Are We on the Verge of Civil War II?](http://commonwonders.com/are-we-on-the-verge-of-civil-war-ii/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.” The words — actually a 2019 Facebook post — are those of then-Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, loosing a puerile smirk as he stirred the pot of
- [How Safe Can We Really Be?](http://commonwonders.com/how-safe-can-we-really-be/) - By Robert C. Koehler It was the guacamole’s fault! That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting
- [Before the Bombs Come the Platitudes](http://commonwonders.com/before-the-bombs-come-the-platitudes/) - By Robert C. Koehler What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief: “. . . my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance
- [I'm Dreaming of a Warm Christmas](http://commonwonders.com/im-dreaming-of-a-warm-christmas/) - By Robert C. Koehler Two a.m. Boink! My eyes pop open. It’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not that I just heard Santa wandering through the house. It’s far more banal: gotta use the bathroom. I crawl out of bed, step bare-assed into . . . oh my God . . . a learning experience. Another
- [Praying We Learn from Each Other](http://commonwonders.com/praying-we-learn-from-each-other/) - By Robert C. Koehler “How exactly is ‘diversity’ our ‘strength’?” Oh, the smug ignorance of Tucker Carlson! Sometimes, in his certainty of rectitude, he asks questions that actually matter — or would matter if they were asked with any sort of honesty. The above quote, blathered on his news show, recently started flickering again in
- [Beyond Razor Wire: A Connected Planet](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-razor-wire-a-connected-planet/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’” OK, he’s a politician — Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked
- [Dancing on the Edge of Hell](http://commonwonders.com/dancing-on-the-edge-of-hell/) - By Robert C. Koehler Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.” This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every
- [Ubuntu or Collective Suicide](http://commonwonders.com/ubuntu-or-collective-suicide/) - By Robert C. Koehler I stroke the killer’s hatred and certainty, knowing the answer we all ache for — why? — will not be forthcoming. Yes, there was another mass shooting the other day, at Club Q in Colorado Springs. A young man clothed in body armor entered the nightclub carrying an assault rifle and
- [Shatter Alley](http://commonwonders.com/shatter-alley/) - By Robert C. Koehler Can a poem transcend fury — fury combined with helplessness? Can individual property owners join NATO? Having no other options than simply to continue seething, let me tear myself psychologically open for a moment here and see what happens. Yeah, this is personal. And yeah, I live in Chicago — part
- [Looking for Victory Beyond the Election](http://commonwonders.com/looking-for-victory-beyond-the-election/) - By Robert C. Koehler After the election comes . . . the coverage, which always, at least in the mainstream media, seems to reduce everything to winning and losing, to strategy and tactics, rather than to the deep issues shaping the future. The mainstream-created context of this year’s midterms amounted to: Will there be a
- [The Drum and the Cardinal](http://commonwonders.com/the-drum-and-the-cardinal/) - By Robert C. Koehler My friends Scott and Betsey gave me a drum a few weeks ago. I played it as I sat with them . . . and I certainly mean the word “play” as childishly as you can imagine. I’m no more a musician than I am a nuclear physicist, but I played
- [Bob's Rhubarb Lounge](http://commonwonders.com/bobs-rhubarb-lounge/) - By Robert C. Koehler Michael suggested the name Bob’s Rhubarb Lounge. I couldn’t stop laughing, at least on the inside. I imagined commissioning someone to make a neon sign with those words, maybe ten feet high. I’d place it in front of my house, of course. Why not? The point of the lounge would be
- [Loving Nature or Profiting from It: Take Your Pick](http://commonwonders.com/loving-nature-or-profiting-from-it-take-your-pick/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s fascinating how “interests” interfere with survival. We prepare for — and, of course, wage — war with an overwhelming percentage of our resources (to the benefit of the profiteers), but we plead poverty when it comes to helping people or, you know, saving the planet. Humanity! The species of global
- [Fifteen Seconds Till Armageddom](http://commonwonders.com/fifteen-seconds-till-armageddom/) - By Robert C. Koehler “When militarism is addressed as a psychosocial disease, the absurd irrationality of its symptoms is clearly exposed.” These words are from a 1992 essay by N. Arther Coulter published in a journal called Medicine and War. Who would have guessed? They’re as relevant now as they were three decades ago. God
- [Death by Nationalism?](http://commonwonders.com/death-by-nationalism/) - By Robert C. Koehler The game may be almost over. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies put it this way: “The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use
- [Transcending the Morality Police](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-the-morality-police/) - By Robert C. Koehler I’ve been haunted by a phrase for almost a month now: “morality police.” The news has been global. A 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested as she was leaving a subway station in Tehran on September 13 by an Iranian police unit known as the Islamic guidance patrol, a.k.a., the morality
- [Nukes, War and Moral Sanity](http://commonwonders.com/nukes-war-and-moral-sanity/) - By Robert C. Koehler What does surrender look like in the world of geopolitics? To my mind, this gets pretty close: “President Biden’s national security adviser said on Sunday that the United States had warned Russia that there would be ‘catastrophic consequences’ for the country if Moscow used nuclear weapons in its increasing desperation to
- [The Military to American Youth: You Belong to Me](http://commonwonders.com/the-military-to-american-youth-you-belong-to-me/) - By Robert C. Koehler Ah, the children! They belong to us, sayeth the Department of Defense. At least some of them do. It’s a little more complicated than it used to be, thanks to one of the changes that occurred back in 1973, a year of startling historical significance. That was the year of the
- [Nikes on a Wire](http://commonwonders.com/nikes-on-a-wire/) - By Robert C. Koehler There they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . . I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recital and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the telephone wire that crosses my street
- [Staring into the Eyes of the Wolf](http://commonwonders.com/staring-into-the-eyes-of-the-wolf/) - By Robert C. Koehler Close your eyes and try to envision the two wolves. Imagine yourself as a terrified child. I think that helps bring the myth to life . . . this myth, said to be Cherokee, of humanity’s two choices. The wolves are engaged in a vicious fight. The wise grandfather explains to
- [The Stained-Glass Teddy Bear](http://commonwonders.com/the-stained-glass-teddy-bear/) - By Robert C. Koehler Relax, kick back, enjoy life. My daughter, Alison, who is 36 years old, flew into town the other day (angel that she is) and I can’t let go of the wonder and miracle of it all . . . being alive. I had intended to write a column this week about
- [With Wars To Wage, Who Can Afford Peace?](http://commonwonders.com/with-wars-to-wage-who-can-afford-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler Texas and Arizona have begun busing refugees at their border – at a cost of millions – up to a couple liberal Northern cities . . . let’s see how they like it! Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott, “has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe” –
- ['Mommy, Somebody's Having a Baby'](http://commonwonders.com/mommy-somebodys-having-a-baby/) - By Robert C. Koehler On a shrugged-off afternoon of YouTube wandering, I came upon this: “Is There Life After Death?” Hmmm . . . well, is there? Turns out it was a presentation by five professors at the University of Virginia, moderated, good God, by John Cleese. I more or less had no choice but
- [Surrendering Power to Reverence](http://commonwonders.com/surrendering-power-to-reverence/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.” So said Pope Francis last week, at a powwow in Alberta, at the start of his “apology tour” across Canada — for the participation of the Catholic Church in the multi-century horror of Native American
- [The Cynics' Monkey Wrench](http://commonwonders.com/the-cynics-monkey-wrench/) - By Robert C. Koehler If you depart from an “us vs. them” philosophy of life, your first confrontation is likely to be with the cynics. Last week, for instance, I wrote about the weekend I spent, a decade ago, getting handgun training from the NRA — and what I learned, which is that the things
- [My Weekend with the Good Guys](http://commonwonders.com/my-weekend-with-the-good-guys/) - By Robert C. Koehler You may find this shocking, but a little over a decade ago I spent a weekend learning how to shoot a handgun — under the auspices of the NRA. I wound up earning myself an NRA “personal protection in the home” certificate. For years I have pondered writing about this weekend,
- [White Supremacists Want 'Their' Country Back](http://commonwonders.com/white-supremacists-want-their-country-back/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is an insurrection percolating in the MAGA universe? A civil war? One thing I notice as I read the growing warnings that this is the case is the assumption that suddenly the USA has become a divided nation, a splintered democracy, when, in point of fact, it has always been deeply
- [Choice Without Shackles](http://commonwonders.com/choice-without-shackles/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” What could be more convincing than that?
- [Good Guys with Guns?](http://commonwonders.com/good-guys-with-guns/) - By Robert C. Koehler Ready, aim, fire: “I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.” So declares Kandiss Taylor, GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, in a campaign ad. Or how about: “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today, we’re going RINO-hunting.” This is not about killing rhinoceroses. “RINO” stands for Republican in Name Only –
- [Embracing the Complexity of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/embracing-the-complexity-of-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars.” Just imagine! The words are those of Robert Weissman, president of the organization Public Citizen, in response to the legislative efforts of Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, who are the co-chairs of — glory hallelujah!
- [The Collateral Damage Comes Home](http://commonwonders.com/the-collateral-damage-comes-home/) - By Robert C. Koehler “They were at places that seemed safe — but few spaces in America are guaranteed safe anymore.” This is CNN, doing its best to stay atop America’s mass shootings and keep the survivors (by which I mean us) informed. Yeah, 13 gun massacres this past weekend, at strip malls, nightclubs, graduation
- [Sexual Abuse and the American Way](http://commonwonders.com/sexual-abuse-and-the-american-way/) - By Robert C. Koehler And another sex scandal pops into the news. This time it’s the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, cringing in shame upon the recent release of a “bombshell” report detailing two decades of sexual abuse by pastors and other church officials, along with ongoing official coverup of the crimes
- [The Heart Is Mightier Than the Sword](http://commonwonders.com/the-heart-is-mightier-than-the-sword/) - By Robert C. Koehler They’re coming for me! Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes
- [Beyond Gun Control, We Need Hatred Control](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-gun-control-we-need-hatred-control/) - By Robert C. Koehler Another terrorist slips into the classroom, into the news. Does anyone understand this? Even if guns are easily, readily available, why, why, why? I find it impossible even to be angry — it’s hard to be angry under incomprehensible circumstances. Instead, I find myself imagining George W. Bush giving a speech
- [Eve's Choice: Patriarchy No Longer Rules](http://commonwonders.com/eves-choice-patriarchy-no-longer-rules/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” — Genesis 2:18. RSV One chapter later, after Eve was held responsible for the First Sin (Adam, the submissive male, just did what she told him to),
- [A Promise to Our Kids: We Won't Kill You](http://commonwonders.com/a-promise-to-our-kids-we-wont-kill-you/) - By Robert C. Koehler At a certain point, as I was reading the book I’d recently been sent, a strange transformation began occurring: Gradually, as I moved ever deeper into it, I wasn’t so much reading as quietly singing a hymn . . . participating in a chant. The book is A Promise to Our
- [The Global Suicide Budget](http://commonwonders.com/the-global-suicide-budget/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” I truly wish these words of Ike, uttered seven decades ago, were no longer quite so relevant. Perhaps what he should have called it was a “cross of irony.” In 2021, the human race, in order
- [Humanity: Evolving in Spite of Itself](http://commonwonders.com/humanity-evolving-in-spite-of-itself/) - By Robert C. Koehler As wars rage, as cruelty shatters lives across the planet — as nuclear Armageddon remains a viable option for all of us — I think it’s time to claim some stunning awareness in this regard. The human race is evolving in spite of itself — evolving beyond war, beyond empire, beyond
- [Nuclear Weapons and Cranial Winter](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-weapons-and-cranial-winter/) - By Robert C. Koehler Nuclear sanity: ultimate (or, God help us, immediate) disarmament. Nuclear insanity: ongoing development and deployment, endless investment, eventual (either accidental or intentional) use. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., addressing Congress several weeks ago, made a heartfelt and powerful case for nuclear sanity, for a revamping of the system of mutually assured destruction,
- [Standing Together for the Sacred](http://commonwonders.com/standing-together-for-the-sacred/) - By Robert C. Koehler The soul of humanity cries out from the crowded streets of Moscow, from steps near the Kremlin, as a man — an artist in the deepest sense — brings the slaughter of civilians in Bucha back to the home country . . . not by killing a bunch of Russians, but
- [Save the Planet, Behead the Military Budget](http://commonwonders.com/save-the-planet-behead-the-military-budget/) - By Robert C. Koehler Americans “need to imagine their vote has an impact on policy, an illusion the media encourages them to believe in.” Ouch! Peter Isaacson, writing in Fair Observer, seems to be saying . . . oh my God, democracy is a cliché, a big sham. I stand up, put my hand on
- [When Jim Crow Greeted Black Veterans](http://commonwonders.com/when-jim-crow-greeted-black-veterans/) - By Robert C. Koehler I figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom. There’s a piece of legislation sitting in the House Veterans Affairs Committee — H.R. 5905 — that cuts a swath 75
- [Transcending the Certainties of War](http://commonwonders.com/3535-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler Peace, in the deepest sense — in the midst of war — requires a clarity and courage well beyond the boundaries of linear understanding. The warning lights flash. World War III has entered the red zone. Can we stare into hell and refuse to see . . . an enemy? This
- [Life Goes on, Right?](http://commonwonders.com/life-goes-on-right/) - By Robert C. Koehler I had a breakthrough yesterday — and I don’t mean metaphorically. Wars rage, countless humans suffer, the rich get richer, life goes on. I still have my morning coffee. But not yesterday. What happened — about 5 a.m. — was a fleeting . . . oh so fleeting . . .
- [The Frailty of Peace in the Midst of War](http://commonwonders.com/the-frailty-of-peace-in-the-midst-of-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Prior to any analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prior to the casting of blame and outrage — at Putin’s hubris, at NATO’s pernicious eastward expansion over the last three decades — there’s this: “Our world has become so interdependent that violent conflict between two countries inevitably impacts the rest
- [Creating Peace Means Changing the World](http://commonwonders.com/creating-peace-means-changing-the-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler Only threat, pain and inflicted hell preserve peace, right? Get the bad guy! Russia: bad. If it invades Ukraine, such a “voluntary war of aggression,” according to David Leonhardt of the New York Times, “would be a sign that Putin believed that Pax Americana was over and that the U.S., the
- [Afghanistan on the Brink of Disaster](http://commonwonders.com/afghanistan-on-the-brink-of-disaster/) - By Robert C. Koehler Gay rights, women’s rights — in reality, these are a nuisance to many U.S. conservatives, but purporting to protect these rights on the other side of the world is a great excuse to play war. And you don’t need bombs to play. All you need is the will to dominate and
- [The Court of Ecological Awareness](http://commonwonders.com/the-court-of-ecological-awareness/) - By Robert C. Koehler Pssst . . . here’s a little secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK? It might cause trouble. In recent years, there have been more than a thousand lawsuits filed around the world — including a few in the United States — challenging corporate or governmental negligence about climate change and ecosystem damage.
- [Ukraine and the Nuclear Paradox](http://commonwonders.com/ukraine-and-the-nuclear-paradox/) - By Robert C. Koehler Somewhere out there in the geopolitical wilderness of Eastern Europe, two powerful beasts stalk each other. One of them is good. One of them is evil. The future of all life on this planet is at stake. We’ll be back after these messages . . . (or maybe not). This seems
- [Jim Crow Wails in Anguish](http://commonwonders.com/jim-crow-wails-in-anguish/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Even if Mitch McConnell’s viral gaffe last week is as innocent as he claims it to be, the stench of something deep — the unexamined racist fear
- [Transcending 'the Religion of Whiteness'](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-the-religion-of-whiteness/) - By Robert C. Koehler Basically, Derek Chauvin was convicted of enforcing the status quo. Because his behavior was caught on video — his knee on George Floyd’s neck, oh my God, choking him to death — and looked so disturbing to most of the public, official American “justice” had to take some sort of action.
- [A Citizen of the World (Still) Speaks](http://commonwonders.com/a-citizen-of-the-world-still-speaks/) - By Robert C. Koehler I decided to honor Martin Luther King Day this year by reading — and trying to absorb, more fully than ever before — the entirety (nearly 7,000 words) of the iconic speech he gave at Riverside Church a year to the day before his assassination. The speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time
- [Untangling Ourselves from the Dark Side](http://commonwonders.com/untangling-ourselves-from-the-dark-side/) - By Robert C. Koehler Guess what? I direct the following insight to, among others, the U.S. Congress, which annually and without comment, with only a few objectors, passes a trillion-dollar (and growing) military budget, by far the largest such budget on Planet Earth. “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” The words are those
- [The Myth of the Good War](http://commonwonders.com/the-myth-of-the-good-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Love thy enemy? I get a chance to do so on a regular basis, thanks to the email (or nasty-mail) I sometimes get in response to my column, e.g.: “Must be a dearth of anyone with anything intelligent to say for the News to put your drivel out for us to
- [Do We Dare Stop Being Afraid of Ourselves?](http://commonwonders.com/do-we-dare-stop-being-afraid-of-ourselves/) - By Robert C. Koehler What’s your story? We tell stories, which evolve into myths — and myths are what hold us together. They create the collective entity known as the human race. And myths evolve. At least, good God, I hope they do. We’re stuck, right now, in the myth of collective suicide, more generally
- [Poisoning Ourselves with War](http://commonwonders.com/poisoning-ourselves-with-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler War spews hell in all directions. Just ask the guys at Talon Anvil, a secret U.S. “strike cell” recently exposed by the New York Times as a unit with a reputation for ignoring the rules of engagement and killing lots and lots of civilians with drone strikes as it plays war
- [Mass Murder: New Victims, Same Old Questions](http://commonwonders.com/mass-murder-new-victims-same-old-questions/) - By Robert C. Koehler Four students dead, six more, plus a teacher, wounded. Can you believe – another mass shooting last week. This one north of Detroit, at Oxford High School. A 15-year-old boy – and his parents – were arrested. While the shock and collective horror are still fresh, before the news cycle moves
- [Our Shackled Planet](http://commonwonders.com/our-shackled-planet/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Protecting the border” is essentially the same thing as protecting your own property, right? You’ve got to protect it from invaders, thieves — lawless jerks who want what you have. If you’re rich and paranoid, then you have no doubt that’s what refugees are, especially down there at the southern U.S.
- [Reclaiming a Lost Sense of Community](http://commonwonders.com/reclaiming-a-lost-sense-of-community/) - By Robert C. Koehler The first time it happened was bad enough. “It” amounted to this: It was Wednesday afternoon, I had finished my column early and walked out to my car, parked in the alley behind my house. I was on my way to an art show — very excited. I got in the
- [National Defense and Dead Children](http://commonwonders.com/national-defense-and-dead-children/) - By Robert C. Koehler A new defense budget looms. Maybe we’re running out of wars to fight, but no matter. The proposed figure before Congress is bigger than ever: $778 billion. How fascinating — and how irrelevant — that the vote is scheduled just a few days after the New York Times published its investigation
- [American History: Let's Face the Truth](http://commonwonders.com/american-history-lets-face-the-truth/) - By Robert C. Koehler When you’re losing the game, summon the commies! And conservative white America has been losing for quite some time — losing control of the future, that is. The good old days of unabated white supremacy aren’t coming back; racism can only maintain a public forum, and political relevance, if it’s wrapped
- [A World Without Money](http://commonwonders.com/a-world-without-money/) - By Robert C. Koehler And climate change begins . . . “Three or four thousand years ago the gods began a migration from the lakes, forests, rivers, and mountains into the sky, becoming the imperial overlords of nature rather than its essence.” So writes Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics, defining a transition in human existence
- [The Myth of Redemptive Violence](http://commonwonders.com/the-myth-of-redemptive-violence/) - By Robert C. Koehler Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell. This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of
- [Assange: A Threat to War Itself](http://commonwonders.com/assange-a-threat-to-war-itself/) - By Robert C. Koehler The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan — originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder
- [A Zen Koan on Columbus Day](http://commonwonders.com/a-zen-koan-on-columbus-day/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s too easy, right? Too simple — shoving Christopher Columbus off the historical honor roll, pulling down his statues, yanking his “day” away from him and renaming it in honor of the people he murdered, kidnapped, turned into property? Or is Indigenous Peoples Day seen by the world as simply a
- [Wrestling with Infinity](http://commonwonders.com/wrestling-with-infinity/) - By Robert C. Koehler I use walking sticks when I walk nowadays, kind of like cross-country skiing in late summer, but I had no idea doing so would connect me with a guy named Joe and open a flow of aching love and the deep desire to matter. “Can I give you a cane?” he
- [Separating the Cross and the Sword](http://commonwonders.com/separating-the-cross-and-the-sword/) - By Robert C. Koehler What is a gaffe but an inadvertent uttering of an awkward truth? For instance: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” The “gaffe” part of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 announcement that the War on Terror had begun was, of course, his calling it a crusade. Doing
- [Women's Rights: Afghanistan and Beyond](http://commonwonders.com/womens-rights-afghanistan-and-beyond/) - By Robert C. Koehler Suddenly there’s major concern across the country — from the mainstream media to every last rock-ribbed Republican — for the rights of Afghan women and girls to be able to work, to go to school. Oh my God, we’ve given Afghanistan back to the Taliban! Even George W. Bush found his
- [A National Rite of Passage: Beyond War](http://commonwonders.com/a-national-rite-of-passage-beyond-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler A recent New York Times op-ed was perhaps the strangest, most awkward and tentative defense of the military-industrial complex — excuse me, the experiment in democracy called America — I’ve ever encountered, and begs to be addressed. The writer, Andrew Exum, was an Army Ranger who had deployments in the early
- [Letting the Future Out of Its Cage](http://commonwonders.com/letting-the-future-out-of-its-cage/) - By Robert C. Koehler We pretend to have enemies, but mostly what we “have” are people whose lives simply don’t matter. And then we kill them, either directly — via airstrikes or other war games, turning them into collateral damage — or indirectly . . . by simply failing to notice that they exist. The
- [After Afghanistan . . . a Truth Commission?](http://commonwonders.com/after-afghanistan-a-truth-commission/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Ten members of one family — including seven children — are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul . . . “The youngest victims of Sunday’s airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members. “Relatives found the remains of one of the
- [Growing Old in the Newborn Universe](http://commonwonders.com/growing-old-in-the-newborn-universe/) - By Robert C. Koehler That link between age and wisdom — is it just a joke? Suddenly I’m curious in a real way. I just turned . . . 75. There’s a significance to that number that isn’t abstract, and I’m having a hard time ignoring it. Perhaps it has more to do with cataracts
- [War, Herbicides and Moral Disengagement](http://commonwonders.com/war-herbicides-and-moral-disengagement/) - By Robert C. Koehler And the least secret agent of all . . . Agent Orange! On August 10, 1961, the United States, several years before it actually sent troops, started poisoning the forests and crops of Vietnam with herbicides. The purpose: to deprive our declared enemy, the commies of Ho Chi Minh, of food
- [Is a United World Possible?](http://commonwonders.com/is-a-united-world-possible/) - By Robert C. Koehler What if . . . ? I get lost — tangled in doubt and cynicism — when I try to pose the question in a more specific way. What if . . . a collective human voice could be heard, crying out across the borders as the pandemic surges, as the
- [A Permanent Structure of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/a-permanent-structure-of-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler Suddenly a shard of history comes flying at me from the ebbing days of World War II, hitting me in the heart. You mean world leaders (not to mention all the rest of us) were serious about transcending — for good — the hell the world had just been through and
- [Moral Intelligence or Nuclear War](http://commonwonders.com/moral-intelligence-or-nuclear-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s dance at the border! One of these days, something will give — the rich, the powerful will suddenly look around cluelessly. What’s happening? Awareness will sweep across the planet: We are one, and life is sacred. This consciousness will even invade political life and what I call moral intelligence will
- [Democracy: Enemy of the Powerful](http://commonwonders.com/democracy-enemy-of-the-powerless/) - By Robert C. Koehler Perhaps the best possible thing we could acknowledge being is a “divided nation.” Failing to do so justifies — or at least avoids noticing — all manner of violent cruelty and repression in the name of so-called democracy, from the jailing of whistleblowers who reveal U.S. war crimes and global criminality,
- [Civilizing the Savage](http://commonwonders.com/3388-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler We crossed the Atlantic, encountered a bunch of savages, defeated them, claimed the continent. We won! This is the history I remember learning, as satisfying and stupid as a John Wayne movie. The myth is crumbling and cracking, its certainty now as precarious as the statue of a Confederate general. Truth
- [The Narrow Borders of Militarism](http://commonwonders.com/the-narrow-borders-of-militarism/) - By Robert C. Koehler An end to war? It’s certainly necessary, but is it politically possible? The fate of House Resolution 476, introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee, will give us a clue how close “we,” by which I mean the leading military power on the planet, are to transcending our suicidal certainties. The wording of
- [Why Did You Kill My Brother?](http://commonwonders.com/why-did-you-kill-my-brother/) - By Robert C. Koehler For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds have turned into twenty-two and a half years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin famously knelt on George Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues
- [Transcending War: Everyone Wins](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-war-everyone-wins/) - By Robert C. Koehler When will we as a nation admit it? Barbara Lee was right. She was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force back in 2001, following the 9/11 disaster, which allowed George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan. A year later she voted against
- [Politically Correct Racism](http://commonwonders.com/politically-correct-racism/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” I offer these words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 2019 essay is part of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” to the Heritage Foundation and the horde of Republican politicians currently trying to update the look and
- [Protecting Borders, Not Life](http://commonwonders.com/protecting-borders-not-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler Remember the Space Force? You know, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, officially created in 2019, “establishing space as a warfighting domain and guaranteeing that the United States will dominate in that environment just like all others.” Thus declared President Donald Trump at the time, unleashing a Hollywood script on
- [Nukes, Lies and Invisible Murder](http://commonwonders.com/nukes-lies-and-invisible-murder/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s listen in for a moment to the gentle, awkward language of mass killing: “The employment or threat of employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations. . . . Integration of nuclear weapons into a theater of operations requires the consideration of multiple variables. Using nuclear
- [Terror Plus Public Relations](http://commonwonders.com/partners-in-terror-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The president reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attack,” The Guardian has informed us, as conflict flares once more in the Middle East. But, oh the humanity! Good guy Joe also “encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians.”
- [Our Own Wisdom Is Telling Us To Evolve](http://commonwonders.com/3343-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s use up the planet and bless the future with its corpse. If politics involved speaking the truth, those words could well be the core slogan of mainstream politicians and their media cohorts, with the purpose of the election process (you know, democracy) being, simply, to choose the specific ways in
- [Armed Racism Keeps No One Safe](http://commonwonders.com/armed-racism-keeps-no-one-safe/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Get out of the car! Get out of the car NOW!!” The officer — the mad man with a badge — probably shouts those words 50 times at the driver, Second Lt. Caron Nazario, at a gas station in Windsor, Va., all the while holding a gun a foot from his
- [Trapped at the Border: Their Fate Is Our Fate](http://commonwonders.com/trapped-at-the-border-their-fate-is-our-fate/) - By Robert C. Koehler You’d think that the “border crisis” begins and ends as a problem for Americans. Oh, what to do, what to do? All these people showing up at our back door, trying to get in. They want to take our jobs, drink our water. . . . And think about the dangers
- [Ending the Endless War](http://commonwonders.com/ending-the-endless-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Will Joe Biden end the endless wars or won’t he? I have serious doubts that he has the will or political acumen to do so. But that’s only a fragment of the question that needs to be asked, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of our global “war on evil.” A
- [Waging War . . . at the Supermarket](http://commonwonders.com/waging-war-at-the-supermarket/) - By Robert C. Koehler When a lost soul attempts to reclaim himself in the American way, it becomes, far too often . . . we all know this . . . another mass murder. In the past week or so, there have been two more of them. “This cannot be our new normal. We should
- [Growing Up Ecologically](http://commonwonders.com/growing-up-ecologically/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is it possible that the country is truly rebuilding itself . . . from the soul up? Deb Haaland has been confirmed as head of the Department of the Interior. A Native American congresswoman and, as she describes herself, 35th-generation New Mexican, has been given the reins of the department that
- [Voter Suppression: Jim Crow Revisited](http://commonwonders.com/voter-suppression-jim-crow-revisited/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The United States of America has open wounds.” Ever since its founding, the United States has been attempting to build a society around those wounds, on the belief that hyped-up language — “all men are created equal,” and so forth — can paper over deep wrongs. If you put the ideal
- [Taking War Personally](http://commonwonders.com/taking-war-personally/) - By Robert C. Koehler “For Washington, it seems that whatever the problem is, the answer is bombing.” So wrote Stephen Zunes, in the wake of Joe Biden’s first act of murder as president . . . excuse me, his first act of defensive military action: bombing a border post in Syria last week, killing 22
- [Windmills: The New Scapegoat](http://commonwonders.com/windmills-the-new-scapegoat/) - By Robert C. Koehler The cornerstone of every social structure is its belief system, and those who control and benefit the most from the system have one primary job: Keep its myths and scapegoats viable. That explains the emergence, in recent weeks, among right-wing politicians and media hacks, of a truly bizarre and unexpected scapegoat:
- [Vulnerability in the Moment](http://commonwonders.com/vulnerability-in-the-moment/) - By Robert C. Koehler Pardon me while I break the fourth wall. I’m in the human stew right now, you might say: drowning in politics, technology, the weather and my own crazy ego. I’m trying to write a column. What makes this one different . . .well, I’ve been forced today to set aside my
- [Stealing the Vote, Building a Wall](http://commonwonders.com/stealing-the-vote-building-a-wall/) - By Robert C. Koehler Imagine a “USA!” that has truly outgrown – transcended – racism. Would it still have a Republican Party? One recent and shocking – but hardly surprising – piece of news is the huge scramble in legislatures, especially the Republican-controlled ones, all across the country to draft and pass legislation restricting the
- [National vs. Human Security](http://commonwonders.com/national-vs-human-security/) - By Robert C. Koehler “It is long past time for . . . a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security . . .” Yes, yes, yes. These words cut to the soul. Can we create a grown-up America? This is how it begins. The quote is from a letter
- [Nukes Are Illegal, Now What?](http://commonwonders.com/nukes-are-illegal-now-what/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s not forget: We are standing at the edge of global change. I believe what’s visible in this fleeting moment is our own evolution. Let’s not let this moment flicker and die, to be replaced, with a despairing shrug, by business as usual. Donald Trump shattered the centrist political norms, sent
- [Countering the Fascism To Come](http://commonwonders.com/countering-the-fascism-to-come/) - By Robert C. Koehler Normalcy and tradition held sway as — for the first time in my life — I watched a presidential inauguration live, listening to Lady Gaga sing the national anthem and, then, Joe Biden take the oath of office, becoming the 46th president of the United States. As I write these words,
- [Lynching Political Correctness](http://commonwonders.com/lynching-political-correctness/) - By Robert C. Koehler I still see the noose in front of the capitol building, dangling oh so metaphorically. “No matter how all this plays out, it’s only the beginning,” wrote a user on TheDonald message board, according to the Associated Press. Actually, it’s anything but the beginning — though I get what the writer
- [Real Change on a Living Planet](http://commonwonders.com/real-change-on-a-living-planet/) - By Robert C. Koehler As the New Year asserts itself — a year that begins in global lockdown and political shock-and-awe — an extraordinary question emerges: Are we on the brink of real change? Are we moving, politically speaking, beyond the small and stupid? Is the era of Trump really over? Assuming that to be
- [Restoring the Soul of America](http://commonwonders.com/restoring-the-soul-of-america/) - By Robert C. Koehler “One major difference between GOP and Dems is that [Republicans] leverage their right flank to gain policy concessions and generate enthusiasm, while Dems lock their left flank in the basement [because] they think that will make Republicans be nicer to them." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nailed it once again, tweeting her frustration and
- [One World: The Wisdom of Wholeness](http://commonwonders.com/one-world-the-wisdom-of-wholeness/) - By Robert C. Koehler “We won't be in a position to make permanent progressive changes until the bad governments are changed permanently into good governments. And all governments are bad governments now and will remain bad governments until we have a global humanity.” The words are those of Mark Haywood, in an email to me
- [Embracing Ecological Realism](http://commonwonders.com/embracing-ecological-realism/) - By Robert C. Koehler Our post-election hope couldn’t be more fragile. Does Joe Biden see his mission as merely reclaiming situation normal from Donald Trump? How aware is he of the big, beyond-our-lifetimes future and the crucial need to address climate change? Is he able to acknowledge that human “interests” go well beyond national borders?
- [Envisioning a New World](http://commonwonders.com/envisioning-a-new-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler Step one: Defeat Trump. OK, now comes the hard part. We have to take back the country, and what I really mean is take it “forward,” beyond situation normal — endless war, structural racism, consumer culture and ecological devastation — and into what one might call planetary stewardship. This sounds, of
- [Beyond Simplistic 'Peace'](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-simplistic-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler So here’s an odd, mostly overlooked scrap of recent news: Donald Trump wants to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before he leaves office, and is expected to announce a drawdown of troops in both countries. Currently there are approximately 4,500 troops in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq. The drawdown
- [The Biden Mandate Won't Go Away](http://commonwonders.com/the-biden-mandate-wont-go-away/) - By Robert C. Koehler And now . . . what? Joe Biden, in blatant defiance of the wishes of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, has won the vote and claimed the presidency. He will now, as he told the nation in his acceptance speech, begin attempting to “restore the soul of America” and “marshal
- [Listening to Trump Leaves Me Speechless](http://commonwonders.com/listening-to-trump-leaves-me-speechless/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted
- [The Parallel Universe of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/the-parallel-universe-of-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler Here’s a piece of paradoxical news that puts even the looming U.S. presidential election in perspective: Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal. Armageddon is against the law! Well, sort of. And the Trump administration doesn’t agree. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far
- [The Anti-Racist Revolution](http://commonwonders.com/the-anti-racist-revolution/) - By Robert C. Koehler The nation has less than two weeks left to live in its comfort zone of platitudes. This is by far the most ominous election buildup of my (fairly lengthy at this point) lifetime. What will happen on Nov. 3 and thereafter? Will all the votes be counted? Presuming Trump loses, will
- [Columbus Day in Pretend America](http://commonwonders.com/columbus-day-in-pretend-america/) - By Robert C. Koehler Before the fake holiday known as Columbus Day completely disappears for another year, I want to grab hold of it for a moment and look at what it really has to offer us: a dizzying dose of historical realism. We’re not who we think we are. The social order in which
- [What Comes Next Is Up to Us](http://commonwonders.com/what-comes-next-is-up-to-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler What if we stopped separating the looming national chaos into separate categories —racism, climate change, war, vote suppression, election theft, pandemic, science denial, white supremacy, police brutality, etc. — and tried looking at it all at once? This may be the legacy of Donald Trump, our first corkscrew-in-chief: He has popped
- [Trump and the Lost Country](http://commonwonders.com/trump-and-the-lost-country/) - By Robert C. Koehler Where, oh where, is the United States of America — global leader, creator of democracy, hope of humankind? It certainly wasn’t up there on the debate stage last night. When 9-year-olds start slinging insults at each other — “Is not!” “Is too!” — it’s hard for platitudes to step in and
- [Election 2020: The Coming Chaos](http://commonwonders.com/election-2020-the-coming-chaos/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is this the future, leaking into the present moment? “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” The speaker, of
- [Life in Cancer Alley](http://commonwonders.com/life-in-cancer-alley/) - By Robert C. Koehler Shut up and let corporate America — and also, for that matter, corporate Taiwan — get on with its business. We have ethane to crack and plastic to produce. We dare not let America run out of shopping bags! Environmental racism? Don’t be ridiculous. This is the message the activists of
- [Standing Up to Trump . . . and Biden](http://commonwonders.com/standing-up-to-trump-and-biden/) - By Robert C. Koehler When I ponder the likelihood of looming electoral chaos — uncounted votes, a defeated president who won’t leave office, the possible termination of American democracy (coming soon!) — I can’t avoid putting it into a larger context: We’ve always been, at best, a partial democracy, skewed in favor of the wealthy
- [Is There Life Beyond Plastic?](http://commonwonders.com/is-there-life-beyond-plastic/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Plastics!” Yeah, it’s everywhere ... not just in grocery store aisles and department stores and every other commercial outlet you can think of, not to mention your own cupboards and closets and trashcans, but on the grass and on the sidewalks, in the landfills, in the lakes and rivers, in the
- [Ending the Civil War](http://commonwonders.com/ending-the-civil-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler This looks like the beginning of a civil war. The chaos and violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin are unfolding as I write. I feel as though I’m watching some natural disaster develop, suddenly overpowering any hope for social change “before it’s too late.” Is it already too late — that is to
- [Election Theft and the Reluctant Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/election-theft-and-the-reluctant-democracy/) - By Robert C. Koehler As election 2020 draws ever closer, the flawed, easily gamed nature of the American quasi-democracy becomes increasingly visible, thanks, of course to Donald Trump, our Fuhrer wannabe, who sees no need to hide his contempt for any result in November other than his own victory. Election theft could well be looming,
- [War, Peace and the Democrats](http://commonwonders.com/war-peace-and-the-democrats/) - By Robert C. Koehler “There’s something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear . . .” Or is it? Day one of the Democratic National (virtual) Convention. Bernie Sanders had just told his supporters: “Together we have moved this country in a bold new direction,” pointing out that “all of us . . .yearn for
- [Learning from the Hibakushas](http://commonwonders.com/learning-from-the-hibakushas/) - By Robert C. Koehler “They were covered with blood and burned and blackened and swollen, and the flesh was hanging from the bones. Parts of their bodies were missing, and some were carrying their own eyeballs in their hands. And as they collapsed, their stomach burst open.” But war is necessary, right? The speaker, quoted
- [Standing Up to the Armed and Inarticulate](http://commonwonders.com/standing-up-to-the-armed-and-inarticulate/) - By Robert C. Koehler Here’s a quietly unsettling moment from the current cries for change churning across the nation: A teenage girl is at a grocery store in the small town of Marion, Virginia. Her brother, Travon Brown, age 17, had recently become both beloved and hated — the center of controversy — in the
- [Cultural Genocide Continues](http://commonwonders.com/cultural-genocide-continues/) - By Robert C. Koehler “There are so many . . . primitive tribes — they don’t understand anything.” The global movement to end racism must turn its attention to the world’s most vulnerable cultures — the indigenous people of Planet Earth — who are still enduring the forces of colonial genocide. They are, after all,
- [What About Armed Protests?](http://commonwonders.com/3200-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler Change. Now. I get that, and understand the symbolism of packed heat. A gun says: We mean business. But that symbolism stops as soon as the trigger is pulled. What the armed protesters could wind up with is a bitter present-day civil war and the blood-stained illusion of change. The country
- [Is the Nation Opening Its Soul?](http://commonwonders.com/is-the-nation-opening-its-soul/) - By Robert C. Koehler Topple a few statues, remove some iconic names from American institutions . . . and the ghosts of the past start to escape from history, filling the present moment. It’s called awareness. Too much awareness can feel like chaos. Not surprisingly, a lot of people would prefer to stick with the
- [Seattle's Cauldron of Possibility](http://commonwonders.com/seattles-cauldron-of-possibility/) - By Robert C. Koehler Maybe CHOP won’t last, but something is changing. Our national groupthink, as maintained with such stalwart certainty over the last half century by centrist politics and the mainstream media, seems to be crumbling before our very eyes. And as the groupthink crumbles, a larger awareness opens. Progressive thinking is finding its
- [Defunding 'Justified' Murder](http://commonwonders.com/defunding-justified-murder/) - By Robert C. Koehler Well, he deserved to die, didn’t he? He fought, he ran, he grabbed the cop’s taser and fired it. And he was intoxicated, apparently. And he was blocking traffic. “If an officer is hit with that Taser, all of his muscles will be locked up, and he’ll have the inability to
- [Globally Uprooting a Racist Past](http://commonwonders.com/globally-uprooting-a-racist-past/) - By Robert C. Koehler “This was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.” And the toppled statue of a 17th century slave trader, now at the bottom of Bristol Harbour, is suddenly more relevant
- [The Knee for Change](http://commonwonders.com/the-knee-for-change/) - By Robert C. Koehler Is George Floyd today’s Emmett Till? Is the nation moving beyond, oh God, its third manifestation of “legal” racism? The first manifestation was, of course, slavery, which was eliminated via the Civil War. The second manifestation was the Jim Crow/KKK era, with its lynchings, black vote suppression, unending segregation and unquestioned
- [Policing and the Sanctity of Life](http://commonwonders.com/policing-and-the-sanctity-of-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler This is so much bigger than personal accountability. Yes, the four police officers present at the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were fired the next day. The case is being investigated by the FBI. And the mayor of Minneapolis and lots of other politicians are talking about “values.”
- [Rethinking Public Safety: Trust vs. Force](http://commonwonders.com/rethinking-public-safety-trust-vs-force/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Guns aren’t just a danger in and of themselves,” writes Noah Berlatsky at Quartz. “They enable a policing philosophy built on violence and forced compliance, rather than one founded on respect, trust and consent. That philosophy affects every police interaction, even those that don’t involve actual shooting.” Examples of this, of
- [Racism and the National Soul](http://commonwonders.com/racism-and-the-national-soul/) - By Robert C. Koehler How deep does American racism go? And is it possible to uproot it? Or will it simply — endlessly — shift shape, wrap itself in the political correctness of the day and morph, say, from slavery to Jim Crow, from Jim Crow to stand-your-ground laws, gerrymandering and voter suppression? At some
- [Can We Achieve Nuclear Adulthood?](http://commonwonders.com/can-we-achieve-nuclear-adulthood/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I’ll never tire of repeating: We need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking.” What if a world leader — someone with extraordinary power, even, my God, control over nuclear weapons — were to talk this way? Well, this is as close as we can get for now. The
- [A United World Must Break Out of Prison](http://commonwonders.com/a-united-world-must-break-out-of-prison/) - By Robert C. Koehler At a time when the president wants to reopen the economy — but not the borders! — it’s time to grab ahold of the moment and start groping in our minds beyond what’s politically possible and start envisioning serious social change. Life is fervid chaos right now for those who are
- [Moral Injury and the Pandemic of Violence](http://commonwonders.com/moral-injury-and-the-pandemic-of-violence/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The vet in the mirror may be wounded in the soul — and it is your duty to carry this one last vet for help.” This is not an easy reach — into the soul of the loneliest man or woman on Earth, which is the definition of everyone who is
- [War, Irony and the New Normal](http://commonwonders.com/war-irony-and-the-new-normal/) - By Robert C. Koehler The uber-irony about the deadly coronavirus is that, as it claims lives, endangers millions and interrupts the social normal, threatening unprecedented global chaos, it is also quietly informing us what we must do to create a better world — and, indeed, creating it, in certain ways, as we look on in
- [What World Shall We Create?](http://commonwonders.com/what-world-shall-we-create/) - By Robert C. Koehler As the quarantine continues, as I gaze out my window at the quiet street in front of my house — wow, look, there’s a cardinal . . . oh yeah, there’s a neighbor walking her dog — I swell with wonder at the paradoxical unity, “the shared humanity,” I feel in
- [Developing a Vaccine Against War](http://commonwonders.com/developing-a-vaccine-against-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler What if the vaccine that’s eventually developed is so large in scope it includes the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Pope Francis? I revisit Guterres’ words of a week ago: “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. That is why today, I am calling for an
- [The Virus Is Our Teacher](http://commonwonders.com/the-virus-is-our-teacher/) - By Robert C. Koehler Last Sunday at 11 a.m. I went for a walk. Even if it’s nothing special, a walk isn’t a normal thing to do these days. But this brief walk — around the block, consuming maybe ten minutes of my time — had a transcendent dimension to it that continues to awe
- [Creative Empathy in a Pandemic](http://commonwonders.com/creative-empathy-in-a-pandemic/) - By Robert C. Koehler One thing about a pandemic: It’s inclusive. We cannot survive it, move beyond it, by protecting merely some people. We have to protect everyone. Of all the disruption, paradox and chaos that have been unleashed by the coronavirus, this is the most stunning: It has something to teach us that we
- [War, Profit and the Coronavirus](http://commonwonders.com/war-profit-and-the-coronavirus/) - By Robert C. Koehler If you want expertise, don’t bother reading any further here. I know as much about coronavirus as any stunned disbeliever with a sudden, irresistible urge to touch his face. This is a news story that’s spookily personal — far more personal, somehow, than all those other ongoing horror stories out there,
- [The Meaning of Super Tuesday](http://commonwonders.com/the-meaning-of-super-tuesday/) - By Robert C. Koehler A gush of corporate relief fills the airwaves as Super Tuesday becomes history. A progressive wave was not electorally visible as the Democratic status quo consolidated itself behind Joe Biden and won nine or maybe ten states. I was feeling a lot more hope when Super Tuesday began than I’m feeling
- [Bernie's Assault on Our Cliché of Greatness](http://commonwonders.com/bernies-assault-on-our-cliche-of-greatness/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Excuse me, occasionally it might be a good idea to be honest about American foreign policy.” I don’t think I’ve heard that much honesty from a mainstream-party presidential candidate in virtually half a century. And suddenly this race begins to matter in a way that seems like . . . oh
- [The Paradox of Climate Security](http://commonwonders.com/the-paradox-of-climate-security/) - By Robert C. Koehler If there’s anything that’s going to shatter national borders and force humanity to reorganize itself, it’s climate change. But as long as we look at this looming planetary unraveling from within the cage of nationalism — especially “white nationalism,” which quietly remains the full meaning of the term — we simply
- [The Wall: Separating Democracy from Voters](http://commonwonders.com/the-wall-separating-democracy-from-voters/) - By Robert C. Koehler The mainstream media imposes some serious certainties on the 2020 presidential election that drive me into a furious despair, e.g.: Even though Bernie Sanders, winner of the first two Democratic primaries, is now leading in the national polls, he “can’t and won’t” be the party’s nominee “because in coming weeks,” writes
- [Voting with Food and Water](http://commonwonders.com/voting-with-food-and-water/) - By Robert C. Koehler A bad app in Iowa throws everything into a tizzy. Who won? Come on, the horse race has begun. Let’s get some numbers up on the board. Spectator Nation stomps its feet. Voting is the activity at the core of democracy, right? It’s a citizen’s sacred duty. While I have always
- [Maneuvering Hell for Our Advantage](http://commonwonders.com/maneuvering-hell-for-our-advantage/) - By Robert C. Koehler When the mainstream media writes about war, even critically, the image that often comes to mind for me is an infant wrapped in plastic. That infant is naked reality, a.k.a., the present moment, suffocating and screaming for its life; the plastic smothering it are the journalistic euphemisms by which murder and
- [FBI, King and the Tremors of History](http://commonwonders.com/fbi-king-and-the-tremors-of-history/) - By Robert C. Koehler Nothing like trying to rewrite history. Remember way back when, when America was one nation under God and everyone got along so nicely? That was the sentiment of an FBI tweet on Martin Luther King Day, which — oh, the horror! — blew up in the agency’s face and brought a
- [Nuclear Hubris](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-hubris/) - By Robert C. Koehler One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals — government people — is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be. When I do so, an internal distress signal starts beeping and won’t stop, especially when the issue under
- [Will We Always Be This Way?](http://commonwonders.com/will-we-always-be-this-way/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The people do not want war!” These were the words that did it, that knocked the composure out of me. I was standing at what felt like the heart of Chicago on a January afternoon, corner of Wabash and Wacker, next to the river and beneath the tower known as Trump.
- [Militarism: The Delusion Lives](http://commonwonders.com/militarism-the-delusion-lives/) - By Robert C. Koehler The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion. War hits the motherlode every year. “The money just isn’t there” for virtually anything that matters — you know, healthcare for all,
- [Deconstructing Russiagate](http://commonwonders.com/deconstructing-russiagate/) - By Robert C. Koehler Oh, how the simplistic certainty resonates. Russsiagate, recently stoked by Hillary Clinton, comes saturated in ironies, which are usually media-invisible. The Democrats’ winning-but-nonetheless-losing presidential candidate of 2016 loosed some pent-up fury at democracy the other day, as well as annoyance with those who challenge the sacred status quo of the American
- [Letting Our Values out of Their Cage](http://commonwonders.com/letting-our-values-out-of-their-cage/) - By Robert C. Koehler My God, they put Jesus and his parents in cages, as though that’s what U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents would do — you know, keep the spirit of love and compassion from entering the United States of America. Are they suggesting there’s an equivalence here between the divine family and
- [Envisioning a United World](http://commonwonders.com/envisioning-a-united-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s bomb Iowa! Or maybe Texas or Michigan or Nebraska . . . Oh wait, I got confused for a second. Those places are part of America and we love them. We would never bomb them. These are places we would bomb: Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El
- [The Intelligence of Tomorrow](http://commonwonders.com/the-intelligence-of-tomorrow/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her [expletive].” These words, uttered by some lost soul, were directed at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar earlier this year. He had called her office and talked to a staffer, calling
- [Celebrating Peace: A Work in Progress](http://commonwonders.com/celebrating-peace-a-work-in-progress/) - By Robert C. Koehler Veterans For Peace, an organization that speaks truth to war like nobody else, is attempting to reclaim Armistice Day, the Nov. 11 holiday that was flipped on its head 65 years ago when it was renamed Veterans Day — and became a celebration not of the end of war but of
- [A Tight Grip on Our Nuclear Toys](http://commonwonders.com/a-tight-grip-on-our-nuclear-toys/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Everyone wants to play with the big boys, and the only way to become one of the big boys is to have nuclear toys.” Attention Planet Earth! Attention Planet Earth! It is time to grow up. The words are those of Mohamed ElBaradei, then director general of the International Atomic Energy
- [Keeping Peace, Not Waging War](http://commonwonders.com/keeping-peace-not-waging-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Another shocking, divisive police video pops up in the news. This one shows a 16-year-old boy getting shot in the back of the head as he runs from the officers about to arrest him. And as he lays dying — unconscious, bleeding to death — a second officer cuffs the boy’s
- [The Collusion of Church and State](http://commonwonders.com/the-collusion-of-church-and-state/) - By Robert C. Koehler Intrigued by the controversy that erupted over Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech before the American Association of Christian Counselors last week in Nashville — it was titled “Being a Christian Leader” and was eventually removed from the State Department website — I wound up reading the whole speech. And I
- [The Rights of Nature](http://commonwonders.com/the-rights-of-nature/) - By Robert C. Koehler “When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, women, indigenous peoples, and slaves were treated as property, without rights.” This isn’t over yet. In the same vein of exploitative ignorance, we’re still treating a living, life-sustaining, crucial being as property: the ecosystem. And in the process, we’re choking our own habitat — that
- [Impeaching the Symptom, Not the Disease](http://commonwonders.com/impeaching-the-symptom-not-the-disease/) - By Robert C. Koehler I feel like I’m watching a sitcom called “America.” Next episode: Will they impeach the president? Stay tuned! “Impeachment is therefore imperative, not only to protect the integrity of next year’s elections but to secure America’s continued democratic existence. If the House does its job, it will fall to Senate Republicans
- [Climate Change and Consciousness Shift](http://commonwonders.com/climate-change-and-consciousness-shift/) - By Robert C. Koehler Climate change: It feels like the approaching End Times. But it’s the secular version thereof, which means that humanity is responsible for both its cause and — if possible — its transcendence. All we need to do is change everything about the way the high-tech, global society functions in the next
- ['I'm Afraid You Have Humans'](http://commonwonders.com/im-afraid-you-have-humans/) - By Robert C. Koehler The irony of this old New Yorker cartoon by Eric Lewis is so precise I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for two years. The speaker is the planet Saturn, clad in doctor’s garb — a stethoscope circling his forehead — giving the bad news to a
- [Altruists of the World Unite!](http://commonwonders.com/altruists-of-the-world-unite/) - By Robert C. Koehler The biggest joke on the planet may be the phrase “national security.” It almost always justifies something brutal, whether outright murder (a.k.a. war) or climate apartheid — the rejection and condemnation of refugees who are fleeing terrible conditions in their homeland, often created or intensified by climate change. Thus Mark Morgan,
- [Defying the Nuclear Sword](http://commonwonders.com/defying-the-nuclear-sword/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” These lost words — Isaiah 2:4 — are nearly 3,000 years old. Did they ever have political traction? To believe
- [We Are All Indigenous](http://commonwonders.com/we-are-all-indigenous/) - By Robert C. Koehler “All things are interrelated. Everything in the universe is part of a single whole. Everything is connected in some way to everything else. It is therefore possible to understand something only if we can understand how it is connected to everything else.” These words, the first of the Twelve Teachings of
- [Participatory Evolution](http://commonwonders.com/participatory-evolution/) - By Robert C. Koehler The big black pickup truck plunged into the protesters blocking the parking lot and I cringed, viscerally, as though I could feel it myself — this merciless crush of steel against flesh. I was recovering from a bicycle injury when I watched the event on the news last week, as members
- [Dead Canaries](http://commonwonders.com/dead-canaries/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe. I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.” This is how the El Paso killer ended his white
- [The Inner Nixon](http://commonwonders.com/the-inner-nixon/) - By Robert C. Koehler The Nixon tapes are still in the news! My God, they’re still spewing bile, still making America’s eyeballs roll. They’re as relevant as ever. Donald Trump, it turns out, is merely the inner Richard Nixon, live and uncensored. He’s also the inner Ronald Reagan — the inner voice, suddenly made public,
- [The Strongest People on the Planet](http://commonwonders.com/the-strongest-people-on-the-planet/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Send her back! Send her back!” The chant: Is it merely a case study in collective stupidity or is it a signal of rising fascism? When I look at the viral video — the latest manifestation of Trumpism and the freeing of good old American racism from the constraints of political
- [Fighting Climate Change Means Ending War](http://commonwonders.com/fighting-climate-change-means-ending-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military industrial-complex in operation.” I was utterly stunned when I read these words of former Wisconsin senator
- [The Mop Closet of American History](http://commonwonders.com/the-mop-closet-of-american-history/) - By Robert C. Koehler “They were quiet, and just staring, blankly,” she said. “There were just blank stares and no expressions on their faces.” Welcome to hell, as presided over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This image bears deep reflection. It doesn’t change. Children are taken from their parents, jammed into cages. They have
- [Trouble at the Border](http://commonwonders.com/trouble-at-the-border/) - By Robert C. Koehler Yes, we have a serious problem at the border — indeed, at every border we create and defend with force of arms and bureaucratic indifference. “‘If you want water, just drink from a toilet.’ That’s what border patrol told one thirsty woman we met on today’s #DemsAtTheBorder trip. These are the
- [Courage Grows Strong at the Wound](http://commonwonders.com/one-publications/) - Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) The book is a collection of my essays fused into several narratives. They run the gamut from the highly personal (dealing with grief, the death of my wife, single parenting) to the acutely political. The book is about the quest for both inner and outer peace, the
- [American Concentration Camps](http://commonwonders.com/american-concentration-camps/) - By Robert C. Koehler “These aren’t people. These are animals.” These words alone set off the alarm — the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America’s democracy nosedive, but he’s its current, deeply troubling manifestation. Should I write this week about the wars he wants to
- [War Begets War . . . and Nothing Else](http://commonwonders.com/war-begets-war-and-nothing-else/) - By Robert C. Koehler Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . . Thanks, John McCain! Let’s mix a little humor in with war. It’s so much easier to take when we do. By the way, have you noticed that we’re always on the verge of war? “The bombing will be massive, but will be
- [The Armed Bureaucracy](http://commonwonders.com/the-armed-bureaucracy/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Sooner or later they end up in a cage, where (they) belong.” This is hardly a surprise: A recent study by the Missouri attorney general’s office shows that black drivers are at least twice as likely — in some towns, much more than that — to be stopped by police as
- [The Quiet Killer at the Core of Patriotism](http://commonwonders.com/the-quiet-killer-at-the-core-of-patriotism/) - By Robert C. Koehler What? Another mass murder? Almost missed this one: Virginia Beach. Twelve killed on May 31, plus the killer himself, who was a city employee — an engineer. He had legitimate access to the building where he shot people on three floors. His guns were legally purchased. Nothing about him, prior to
- [Shattering the Context of War](http://commonwonders.com/shattering-the-context-of-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler The U.S. government protects itself, not democracy. That’s what is most apparent about its 18-count indictment of Julian Assange, not to mention the ongoing imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, for the leaking and release of State Department and military documents and videos a decade ago. The current reporting on the indictment is
- [Politicizing a Woman's Body](http://commonwonders.com/politicizing-a-womans-body/) - By Robert C. Koehler White men rule! That’s the uber-message quietly emerging from the new anti-abortion laws recently passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri, no matter that the public remains predominantly supportive of safe, legal abortions. That doesn’t matter, see. The fact that the Republican Party controls the legislatures in so many states where
- [War's Unanswered Questions](http://commonwonders.com/wars-unanswered-questions/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Over these last few years, given the wars it has waged and the international treaties it has arbitrarily reneged on, the U.S. government perfectly fits its own definition of a rogue state.” — Arundhati Roy You have the world’s largest military, you’re going to use it, right? Donald Trump and his
- [What's Next: War with Venezuela?](http://commonwonders.com/whats-next-war-with-venezuela/) - By Robert C. Koehler Mix a little socialism in with the oil and war may be unavoidable. Thus, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, talking about Venezuela: “The president has been crystal clear and incredibly consistent. Military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United States will do.” He goes on, demonstrating how
- [Nonviolence or Nonexistence](http://commonwonders.com/nonviolence-or-nonexistence/) - By Robert C. Koehler The day before he died, Martin Luther King said these words at a packed church in Memphis: “Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it
- [Hell Mixed with Futility](http://commonwonders.com/hell-mixed-with-futility/) - By Robert C. Koehler Oh, the normalcy of militarism! Our annual financial hemorrhage to this complex menagerie of institutions — from the Pentagon to Homeland Security to the Nuclear Security Administration to the CIA and its secret expenditures — must not be seriously questioned in the corridors of Congress, even though, all things considered, it
- [War Crimes and National Security](http://commonwonders.com/war-crimes-and-national-security/) - By Robert C. Koehler How dare she question the sanctity of American militarism? As national security adviser John Bolton declared last fall, the International Criminal Court constitutes “an assault on the constitutional rights of the American people and the sovereignty of the United States.” That’s you and me that Bolton is speaking about, and the
- [Challenging the Status Quo in 2020](http://commonwonders.com/challenging-the-status-quo-in-2020/) - By Robert C. Koehler Reparations for slavery? Upending militarism and waging peace? Taking climate change seriously? Getting carbon out of the atmosphere and fossil fuel money out of the EPA? Valuing healing over punishment in our disastrous criminal justice system? Ending mass incarceration? Bringing all this up — and much, much more — in a
- [Our Wounded Planet](http://commonwonders.com/our-wounded-planet/) - By Robert C. Koehler Should we save the planet or kill the enemy? Perhaps no question more succinctly separates the past from the future, or so it occurred to me after I read Rebecca Solnit’s stunning observation in a recent essay: that the mass murders in Christchurch, N.Z. on March 15 occurred on the same
- [Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth](http://commonwonders.com/re-inhabiting-planet-earth/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.” These words of Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre, quoted by Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
- [Putting Our Better Angels to Work](http://commonwonders.com/putting-our-better-angels-to-work/) - By Robert C. Koehler Nationalists — white or otherwise — need “invasions” on a regular basis in order to stay revved up and equal to the cause. Thus: “We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history,” the New Zealand killer (whose name I will not mention, honoring the precedent set
- [Artificial Morality](http://commonwonders.com/artificial-morality/) - By Robert C. Koehler Artificial Intelligence is one thing. Artificial morality is another. It may sound something like this: “First, we believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation’s best technology, including from Microsoft.” The words are those of Microsoft
- [Are You Black, White or Human?](http://commonwonders.com/are-you-black-white-or-human/) - By Robert C. Koehler Some of my best friends are colored. All of them are, actually. And so I introduce you to Lowell Thompson, artist — indeed, psycho-realist, as he calls himself — recovering ad man and “colored person.” He’s also, you might say, the king of irreverence and political incorrectness, but this is only
- [The Music That's in All of Us](http://commonwonders.com/the-music-thats-in-all-of-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler And suddenly the music burst through the borders. This was in May of 1999, in a city in the Netherlands called Alkmaar. Laura Hassler, an American woman who had been living in the Netherlands for many years by then — who was a choir director and, in essence, the “town musician,”
- [Jim Crow Jumps into the Game](http://commonwonders.com/jim-crow-jumps-into-the-game/) - By Robert C. Koehler History in blackface slaps the present moment awake. What? The governor put that picture on his yearbook page? In 1984? The wave of outrage, the demand for his resignation — from Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s own party, the Democrats — can’t be dismissed with a shrug and an apology. His career
- [The Possible Future](http://commonwonders.com/the-possible-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler Lurid headlines have been blooming in my fair city, Chicago, along with the daffodils. A dozen dead, 40 injured in less than a week. The mayor calls a gun summit. The police chief promises to send SWAT teams in full battle dress to troubled neighborhoods. “If the structures of the human
- [We Shall Not Be Moved](http://commonwonders.com/we-shall-not-be-moved/) - By Robert C. Koehler “A fight, a fight . . .” Oh Lord. From what depths did this story come? This was the power of the peace circle, pulling something out of me beyond any known zone of emotional safety. There were five or six of us, in a small breakout group, challenging one another
- [Healing in North Lawndale](http://commonwonders.com/healing-in-north-lawndale/) - By Robert C. Koehler “This isn’t rocket science,” Jackie Ingram said, humorously downplaying her involvement in the Restorative Justice Community Court, a pilot project of the Cook County Circuit Court, which has brought a new, healing-focused system of justice to her community this past year. My thought in that moment was: She’s right. Saving kids
- [Turning Perpetrators into Healers](http://commonwonders.com/turning-perpetrators-into-healers/) - By Robert C. Koehler Al Franken the serial groper. Al Franken the scapegoat. History proceeds clumsily. Innocent people — or “innocently guilty” people, like the junior senator from Minnesota — often get unfairly hung out to dry. Should he have to resign? As far as I can tell, his alleged sexual wrongdoings over the years
- [The Militarized Divide](http://commonwonders.com/the-militarized-divide/) - This shattered nation. “Eric Garner was overweight and in poor health. He was a nuisance to shop owners who complained about him selling untaxed cigarettes on the street. When police came to arrest him, he resisted. And if he could repeatedly say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ it means he could breathe.”
- [Going Deep: Race and the Third Rail](http://commonwonders.com/going-deep-race-and-the-third-rail/) - Let’s take a stroll along the third rail of American culture, shall we? We can follow it straight into the grocery store, where Joy DeGruy and her sister-in-law are standing at the checkout line. The sister-in-law, who is biracial but looks white, chats amiably with the clerk as she writes out a check for her groceries, and life is lovely as can be. But when Joy, who is black, tries to pay for her groceries, the clerk stares at her coldly and asks for two pieces of ID, then searches for her name on the “bad check” list. Joy’s 10-year-old daughter, standing with her mom, wells up with tears, unable to fathom why this sweet, friendly checkout girl has suddenly turned mean.
- [Beyond Our Broken Dreams](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-our-broken-dreams/) - Every night gunshots lullaby me to sleep In ruins of abandoned buildings the broken glass is where we bottle up all our broken dreams. . . . Hold the dream with me, as it breaks loose from Jameale Pickett’s poem. Something beyond the insane dance of crime and punishment is happening, at least this year, this moment, in Chicago’s high schools. Young people are getting a chance to excel and become themselves, as more and more schools find and embrace common sense, also known as restorative justice.
- [Bereft of Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/bereft-of-democracy/) - “(Chris) Christie is the caricature of a Third World despot,” writes Chris Hedges of the reeling New Jersey governor. “He has a vicious temper, a propensity to bully and belittle those weaker than himself, an insatiable thirst for revenge against real or perceived enemies, and little respect for the law and, as recent events have made clear, for the truth.” And he still might wind up becoming our next president.
- [Reclaiming 'Chiraq'](http://commonwonders.com/reclaiming-chiraq/) - I felt the music and the fire as the civil rights movement rose from its slumber. “Repair . . . justice!” went the call and response last week, in the basement of an old Chicago church at the corner of Ashland and Washington. “Restore . . . life! Rebuild . . . community!”
- [Hope Flows from Hollow Water](http://commonwonders.com/hope-flows-from-hollow-water/) - The community was out of control — the children, oh my God, the children, were sniffing gasoline and pretty much abandoning any pretense of a future — and the social and criminal-justice systems were just adding to the problem. Nothing was working. “Our children slammed us against a brick wall,” Burma Bushie said.
- [An Incubator for Peace](http://commonwonders.com/an-incubator-for-peace/) - You’re young and prone to trouble. You get triggered quickly. Someone tells you that you’ve screwed up and you’re about to lash back. Then, instead, you think: 1. Look at the other person. 2. Say “OK.” 3. Stay calm.
- [Lasting Peace](http://commonwonders.com/lasting-peace/) - A child is murdered and we thrash about once more in the spectacle of tragedy. “With outrage over Hadiya Pendleton’s slaying spreading from City Hall to the White House,” the Chicago Tribune reported last week, “the 15-year-old became a symbol Wednesday of escalating violence in Chicago while fueling the national debate over guns and crime.”
- [Get a Rock and Talk](http://commonwonders.com/get-a-rock-and-talk/) - The thing is, he’d won his case. He got custody of his daughter. This is the limit of conventional justice: “victory,” which of course means defeat for the other person, in this case, the mother of his daughter. Why not celebrate? His lawyer was satisfied. I mean, come on, you won, man!
- [The Alchemy of Forgiveness](http://commonwonders.com/the-alchemy-of-forgiveness/) - “Fifteen men beat us and raped us,” the young woman said. “I was 12. There was one man I knew. My uncle. That man I still see around — whenever I see him I feel afraid.” 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.”
- [Transforming Troubled Schools](http://commonwonders.com/transforming-troubled-schools/) - 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?
- [Building Community, Building Peace](http://commonwonders.com/building-community-building-peace/) - In our techno-saturated society, we have the casual capacity to capture any unfolding event on film — even an act of shocking violence — and send images of the live action around the globe just by whipping out a cell phone. Two years ago, Chicago’s Fenger High School had its 15 minutes of horrific fame when the beating death of one of its students, an honor student named Derrion Albert — waiting for a bus after school, caught suddenly in a surge of gang violence, savagely beaten with two-by-fours and railroad ties — was recorded on someone’s cell camera and became an international spectacle.
- [Power With, Power Over](http://commonwonders.com/power-with-power-over/) - By Robert C. Koehler I don’t know if words can transform the world — I know they can’t bring back a murdered child — but I have a few of them to scatter on the grave of Derrion Albert, the Chicago boy whose brutal slaying two weeks ago stunned the city and the nation: Power
- [Single-Eyed Vision](http://commonwonders.com/single-eyed-vision/) - By Robert C. Koehler “What is seen with one eye has no depth.” I’m thinking, as I ponder the wisdom of Ursula LeGuin, that American culture is at the end of what it can accomplish with its single-eyed vision. For all our material progress, for all our ability to dominate just about anything or anyone
- [A Hole in the Night](http://commonwonders.com/a-hole-in-the-night/) - By Robert C. Koehler It all felt wild and uncontained, like on the playground. I was the outsider kid, wrong jacket, wrong hat. Or maybe I just stepped out of my car at the wrong time. With a whoop they were on me, surrounding me, laughing. What great fun. Then one of them shoved me
- [Scratching the Itch](http://commonwonders.com/scratching-the-itch/) - By Robert C. Koehler The whole point of so much of what we do seems to be to weed people out. We do it for fun, and without awareness. The following miniature news item, accompanied by a voyeuristic surveillance camera photo, ran as filler in Redeye, the Chicago Tribune adjunct publication for the too-busy-to-read crowd:
- [Crime and Healing](http://commonwonders.com/crime-and-healing/) - “I have nowhere to talk about this except here in a prison setting,” Peg said. “You are my community.” The circle grew close, intimate — sacred — as the three women spoke. There were about 35 of us in all, sitting on hard plastic chairs. Twenty wore green: the inmates. The building was wrapped in razor wire. It was a maximum security prison called Columbia Correctional Institution, in Portage, Wis. Built for 450 prisoners, it houses, two decades after it opened, about 900. The setting was old justice, but something new was happening.
- [The Learning Curve of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/the-learning-curve-of-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Why are we violent, but not illiterate?” This question, originally posed by writer Colman McCarthy, was asked at the Midwest Regional Department of Peace conference, which was held last weekend outside Detroit. It cuts to the core of our troubles. The answer is agonizingly obvious: “We’re taught to read!” Could it
- [Deep Justice in Ferguson](http://commonwonders.com/deep-justice-in-ferguson/) - Black ’hood, white cops. “Get the fuck on the sidewalk.” And so it begins, and begins, and begins. An African-American boy dies for walking in the street — for yet one more insanely small transgression. Protesters cry for justice. The legal bureaucracy hunkers down, defends itself, does what it can to paint the deceased 18-year-old, Michael Brown, as a bad guy. Sides harden in the media. Once more it’s us vs. them. Nobody talks about making things right; nobody talks about healing.
- [Ferguson and the 'Us vs. Them' Illusion](http://commonwonders.com/ferguson-and-the-us-vs-them-illusion/) - As the grand jury’s decision on whether nor not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson loomed, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon told a TV reporter “he’s preparing for peace and war.” What the governor did, in the tense uncertainty preceding the decision, was pre-declare a state of emergency and activate the Missouri National Guard to help contain the possibility of violent, anti-police protests. He also appointed 16 people, including several of the protesters, to a newly created “Ferguson Commission” to recommend solutions to the racial problems plaguing that community, which the killing of Michael Brown last August made unavoidably apparent.
- [Court Convenes: Healing and Justice Meet](http://commonwonders.com/court-convenes-healing-and-justice-meet/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Even if you’re the one charged, you will help create the answer.” And the court has now come to order. The speaker is Colleen Sheehan, the presiding judge of the Restorative Justice Community Court, which opened last week in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale, after several years of intense planning.
- [Restorative Justice and the Rebirth of Chicago](http://commonwonders.com/restorative-justice-and-the-rebirth-of-chicago/) - The vision is a city interlaced with restorative justice hubs — community centers that bring hope and promise to troubled kids in a town where too many of them are dying. “It is not OK that my friends and I have already planned our funerals,” then-high school senior Keann Mays-Lenoir told a crowd of 300 people a year ago, at a rafter-shaking meeting where the idea was introduced. It builds slowly, from the bottom up. Reclaim common sense. Reclaim community. Reclaim Chicago.
- [Healing the Criminal Justice System](http://commonwonders.com/healing-the-criminal-justice-system/) - “It’d be really hard to have a higher recidivism rate than we have in Cook County.” Maybe this is the place to start a brief meditation on changing the world, or at least Chicago . . . known to some of its residents as “Chiraq.”
- [Juvenile Justice and the War on Teens](http://commonwonders.com/juvenile-justice-and-the-war-on-teens/) - “Fundamental to this process is the idea of ‘collective responsibility’ . . .” The study, released earlier this year, is called: “What Can the Cook County Juvenile Court Do to Improve Its Ability to Help Our Youth? A Juvenile Justice Needs Assessment.”
- [Rethinking Criminal Justice](http://commonwonders.com/rethinking-criminal-justice/) - “For over forty years our criminal justice system has over-relied on punishment, policing, incarceration and detention. This has ushered in an age of mass incarceration. This era is marked by sentencing policies that lead to racially disproportionate incarceration rates and a variety of ‘collateral consequences’ that have harmed our communities and schools. . . .” In this time when our self-inflicted troubles seem so obvious but the possibility of change — that is to say, political transformation, through awareness, compassion and common sense — feels more illusory than ever, something extraordinary, that is to say real, is on the brink of happening in Chicago.
- [The Sacred and the Dead](http://commonwonders.com/the-sacred-and-the-dead/) - How do values enter politics? The Bolivian national legislature, pressured by a movement of indigenous people and small farmers, may be about to birth a stunning global precedent in the creation of an environmentally sane future: establishing legal rights for Mother Earth.
- [Duck and Cover](http://commonwonders.com/duck-and-cover/) - “Within 10 seconds the fire that wiped out the city came after us at full speed. Everyone was naked. Bodies were swelling up. Some people were so deformed I couldn’t tell if they were male or female. People died screaming, ‘Please give me water!’ “There was nothing to eat, not even garbage, in the burned down city.”
- [Autocratic Deafness](http://commonwonders.com/autocratic-deafness/) - The Arab Spring — which indeed is a global spring — is a struggle, an upheaval, for fundamental justice and humanity. That’s the problem. We —the Washington Consensus, the post-colonial West, the world’s military and economic overlords — have no more enthusiasm for this awakening, this cry for genuine democracy and equitable distribution of resources, than the tottering autocrats of the Middle East, most of whom (exception: Muammar Gaddafi) are our allies.
- [A Vortex of Death and Wealth](http://commonwonders.com/a-vortex-of-death-and-wealth/) - Whatever the strategic — and humanitarian — considerations behind NATO/U.S. intervention in Libya, a larger force utterly indifferent to both, and seldom sufficiently newsworthy to merit mention, unites tyrant and rescuer and keeps the world tangled in an endless cycle of hellish violence far beyond the scope of the conflict that generates it. I’m talking about the global arms trade, for which wars large and small, whatever their cause, whatever their “legitimacy,” are necessities without which the goods would not move. They’re also more than that, but not the sort of thing we salute or honor with granite statuary.
- [Insanity Dawn](http://commonwonders.com/insanity-dawn/) - As the Tomahawk missiles, our million dollar babies, rained down on Gaddafi’s army and who knows what else these past couple weeks, I couldn’t help but feel the clenched American fist protruding over global events again. Yeah, we’re back, world. How tragic that bellicose Republicans, in their indiscriminate hatred of Obama, have had to excuse themselves from the celebration, but still, Libya ain’t Egypt, and America is in its groove again, unwavering in its commitment to freedom. No hedged bets, no sir, not this time, not when freedom’s prelude is bombs, invasion and war.
- [The Healing Walls](http://commonwonders.com/the-healing-walls/) - “There’s something about creating beauty that reaches people and that in the end gives us hope that things can change. . . . It shifts the consciousness of a neighborhood.” Sometimes people really mean what they say. An extraordinary documentary, “Concrete, Steel and Paint,” takes us on a journey of transformation — and it goes the long way, the honest way, through the shoals of anger and mistrust that separate social opposites. The film is about prisoners in a maximum security facility outside Philadelphia. It’s also about crime victims, women and men damaged — driven, in some cases, to the edge of “why go on living?” — by the murder of a loved one, by sexual assault, by some deep violation.
- [You Can't Kill an Idea](http://commonwonders.com/you-cant-kill-an-idea/) - The crowds keep swelling, as though awareness, determination – humanity itself – were rising up from the earth. Einstein observed that we can never solve problems at the same level of thinking that created them. I hear the resonance of a new moral intelligence asserting itself, on the streets of the Middle East, in the United States and around the world. “You can kill a man,” said Medgar Evers, “but you can’t kill an idea.”
- [The Tunisia Effect](http://commonwonders.com/the-tunisia-effect/) - On one weekend in February of 2003, an estimated 10 million people in 60 countries took to the streets to protest the looming Iraq war. Never before in history had there been such massive, public opposition to a war before it began. But the war began anyway and the people — their numbers misreported in much of the media by a factor of ten, their opposition seemingly irrelevant — went away. Are they back now?
- [A Truth More Powerful Than an Army](http://commonwonders.com/a-truth-more-powerful-than-an-army/) - It was just a routine murder. Last June, police accosted a young man at an Internet café in the city of Alexandria. He had just filmed their drug deal, or he simply refused to show them his ID. Whatever the provocation — accounts vary — they slammed his head against the table, dragged him outside as he screamed, beat him viciously for 20 minutes. That was that. You can pick up the body later.
- [Stories of nonviolent dispersal of danger](http://commonwonders.com/stories-of-nonviolent-dispersal-of-danger/) - Letters from readers telling stories of nonviolent dispersal of danger. This is an ongoing project. Stories will be added as they come in. My intention is to puncture the idea that we must be armed to be empowered, indeed, to break the grip that guns have on our society and pierce what theologian Walter Wink
- [The Moral Arc of the Universe](http://commonwonders.com/the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/) - The city of Chicago and the federal government will be putting on a $55 million security extravaganza later this month to protect NATO delegates, representing the most powerful military force on the planet, from nonviolent protesters who want to see an end to war. 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”).
- [Grief Without Borders](http://commonwonders.com/grief-without-borders/) - “She had a great sense of humor and freckles and red hair that brought her right to her Irish roots.” She was “a dream daughter.” I have a daughter, so maybe that’s why these words cut so deep.
- [The Man Who Stood Up to Armageddon](http://commonwonders.com/the-man-who-stood-up-to-armageddon/) - By Robert C. Koehler Suddenly it’s possible — indeed, all too easy — to imagine one man starting a nuclear war. What’s a little harder to imagine is one human being stopping such a war. For all time. The person who came closest to this may have been Tony de Brum, former foreign minister of
- [Disarmament, Not Low-Yield Nukes](http://commonwonders.com/disarmament-not-low-yield-nukes/) - By Robert C. Koehler Seven-plus decades ago, as humanity was ensnarled in a monstrous world war, its instinct to win — to dominate others above all else — achieved ultimate manifestation: the capacity to annihilate all life on Planet Earth. Nuclear weapons are, you might say, the logical outcome of the 10,000-year journey of civilization:
- [King's Vision Is Still Defiant](http://commonwonders.com/kings-vision-is-still-defiant/) - By Robert C. Koehler Mike Pence, in his attempt the other day to commandeer the spirit of Martin Luther King to shill for his boss’s agenda, unintentionally did so much more. He brought the enormity of King’s vision back into national awareness, where it shattered the Trump Wall of Fear just as resoundingly as it
- [What About Open Borders?](http://commonwonders.com/what-about-open-borders/) - By Robert C. Koehler There are things that go unquestioned in the national discussion. Because this is a country wrapped in fear and self-importance, the basic, unchallenged premise determining how we behave, how we spend our money, is that we need to protect ourselves . . . from The Enemy. There’s always an enemy lurking
- [A Green Future Is One Without War](http://commonwonders.com/a-green-future-is-one-without-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Donald Trump and his base — the leftover scraps of Jim Crow, the broken shards of racist hatred that once were the American mainstream and made the country seem “great” to those who weren’t its victims — have, it appears, a crucial role to play in our future. President Trump is
- [A Loose Cannon for Peace?](http://commonwonders.com/a-loose-cannon-for-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler Circle the wagons! Apparently what’s under assault is war itself, or so the Establishment believes, in the wake of the shocking announcement by the president that he plans to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops now deployed in Syria and 7,000, or half, the U.S. troops in Afghanistan. No, can’t do that!
- [Yemen: Our Future?](http://commonwonders.com/2833-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler “They must kill and continue to kill, strange as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing.” — Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Socially sanctioned killing is called war. The word “war” may be the most powerful word in human history, because
- [Border Security](http://commonwonders.com/border-security/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s the phrase “border security” that freezes my soul every time I hear it uttered, every time I see it in print — so simplistically obvious, the equivalent of keeping your door locked. Did you ever have your cellphone swiped? If you’re careless about this, you’ll pay the price. “This is
- [The Lost and the Entitled](http://commonwonders.com/the-lost-and-the-entitled/) - By Robert C. Koehler When I popped open the old laptop, the Geek Squad guy said maybe I should dust it off. He slid a canister of Endust toward me. “Spray the cloth,” he said, “not the machine.” I started choking on my sense of humiliation. This poor baby was covered with dust. How could
- [The Demonic Suction Tube](http://commonwonders.com/the-demonic-suction-tube/) - By Robert C. Koehler Suddenly America’s political cauldron bubbles with hope and possibility — not just because the Democrats have won races across the country, but because voters pushed back in record numbers against the forces of Trump and racism and the long-standing lies of entrenched wealth. Now the work begins: to hold our political
- [The New Abnormal](http://commonwonders.com/the-new-abnormal/) - By Robert C. Koehler Thousand Oaks, California: a city torn apart by wildfire and gunfire. Both are unnatural disasters. “This is the new abnormal,” Gov. Jerry Brown said this week at a press conference, talking about global warming and the three voracious fires that are tearing up his state, one of them — the Camp
- [The Issues That Won't Go Away](http://commonwonders.com/the-issues-that-wont-go-away/) - By Robert C. Koehler How much real change manifested itself in the 2018 midterms? How deeply does the outcome reflect the American soul? Apparently, about 113 million Americans, basically half the electorate, felt compelled to vote in the midterms, revved up either by intense opposition to or support for Donald Trump. This is a lot
- [Mass Murder and American History](http://commonwonders.com/mass-murder-and-american-history/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” This is bigger than hate, this latest mass shooting, last weekend, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which, oh my God, 11 more innocent souls died at the hands of a home-grown terrorist. The president’s anti-immigrant tweets may have been in grotesque
- [Why Do Only Some Lives Matter?](http://commonwonders.com/why-do-only-some-lives-matter/) - By Robert C. Koehler What would it take for everyone’s life to matter as much as Jamal Khashoggi’s? I ask this question over at the edge of the news, looking for a doorway into the human conscience. Consider: “The U.S. sold a total of $55.6 billion of weapons worldwide in the fiscal year that ended
- [Climate Change and Collective Salvation](http://commonwonders.com/climate-change-and-collective-salvation/) - By Robert C. Koehler In the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, as white male privilege reclaims its desperate grip on our future, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report comes out, informing us that we haven’t got much future left in which to avoid . . . I mean implement . . .
- [From Carswell to Kavanaugh](http://commonwonders.com/from-carswell-to-kavanaugh/) - By Robert C. Koehler These words did in G. Harrold Carswell nearly five decades ago: “I am Southern by ancestry, birth, training, inclination, belief and practice. And I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life in our states. I have always so believed and I
- [The Curse of Eve](http://commonwonders.com/the-curse-of-eve/) - By Robert C. Koehler This is so much bigger than Brett Kavanaugh, or the outcome of his nomination. Women are suddenly opening their secret wounds. Their trauma — often many decades old — is becoming, for the first time, public. So are their tears. Enduring a sexual assault is only the beginning of the journey
- [The Accusation That Wouldn't Go Away](http://commonwonders.com/the-accusation-that-wouldnt-go-away/) - By Robert C. Koehler Sexual assault is such a nuisance, not only, but especially, for Republicans. Here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board, attempting, with gentlemanly politeness, to dispense with Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh as quickly as possible: “Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years,
- [Keeping Racism Alive at the Polls](http://commonwonders.com/keeping-racism-alive-at-the-polls/) - By Robert C. Koehler There’s almost no such thing as voter fraud, even though the Trump administration — and Republicans in general — affect to be so afraid of it they’ve had to develop a system guaranteed to purge voters from the rolls in enormous numbers. They’re keeping America safe! From nothing. This, you might
- [Reviving the Spirit of '68](http://commonwonders.com/reviving-the-spirit-of-68/) - By Robert C. Koehler I was a hippie/bicycle delivery boy living in San Francisco when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago fifty years ago, so I absorbed the chaos, the police riot, from half a continent away, but I knew with absolute certainty that the nation was changing and I was part of
- [Recreating the Wilderness](http://commonwonders.com/recreating-the-wilderness/) - By Robert C. Koehler The science gets ever more dire. The politics runs the other way. We’ve claimed hold of the planet, but cluelessly, like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Welcome to the Anthropocene: the age of humanity intertwined with nature. “Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that
- [The Right To Be Afraid](http://commonwonders.com/the-right-to-be-afraid/) - By Robert C. Koehler “He owned the gun legally and had a concealed carry permit.” That matters? In an otherwise neutral and informative article, this reads like a bit of legal fetishism. Another human being is dead, oh so needlessly and pointlessly, thanks to a moment of lethally armed anger in a convenience store parking
- [Poverty, Violence and Spiritual Wildfires](http://commonwonders.com/poverty-violence-and-spiritual-wildfires/) - By Robert C. Koehler “They take advantage of that opportunity and they shoot into a crowd, no matter who they hit.” The news this past weekend emerging from my fair city, Chicago, felt like news about wildfires sweeping across California: the sudden, hellish karma of climate change, that is to say, the gradual collapse of
- [Border Security: Wall vs. Principles](http://commonwonders.com/border-security-wall-vs-principles/) - By Robert C. Koehler Consider the limited thinking that produces a concept such as “border security.” The essential assumption here is that the United States of America is primarily a physical container – three and a half million square miles of freedom and prosperity, whoopee, but the supply is limited. Sorry, have-nots, we don’t have
- [A World Designed by Playground Bullies](http://commonwonders.com/a-world-designed-by-playground-bullies/) - By Robert C. Koehler As the week’s news slaps against my consciousness like road slush, some fragments sting more than others. For instance: “According to the DOJ’s court filing, parents who are not currently in the U.S. may not be eligible for reunification with their children.” I can’t quite move on with my life after
- [Mixing Guns and Racism](http://commonwonders.com/mixing-guns-and-racism/) - By Robert C. Koehler In Illinois, as in all the rest of the states, it’s legal to carry a concealed handgun, unless you’re at a ballgame or in the library or a number of other designated public places. But one of those places is not the corner of 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard, in Chicago’s
- [The Dems Could Win if They Stood for Something](http://commonwonders.com/the-dems-could-win-if-they-stood-for-something/) - By Robert C. Koehler The Democrats have been in turmoil for the last half century and then some, when they abandoned their racist base and supported the civil rights movement. Revved up by the spirit of the ’60s, the party began opening itself to further change, even daring to push beyond the financial interests of
- [Womp, Womp: Racism in a Cage](http://commonwonders.com/womp-womp-racism-in-a-cage/) - By Robert C. Koehler “We offer your love to all of our children . . .” the Episcopal priest said, her eyes closed in prayer. Some 170 people were gathered around her, as she stood in a gazebo in a park in Huntsville, Ala. This was one of the 700-plus protests across the country last
- [Valuing Life More Than Borders](http://commonwonders.com/valuing-life-more-than-borders/) - By Robert C. Koehler “We are people who believe in the worth of every human being,” Elizabeth Warren said the other day, and I wondered for a moment what life would be like if that were true. The more crucial question, however, is: How can we make it true? Warren had just returned from McAllen,
- [Trump, Kim and the Nuclear Status Quo](http://commonwonders.com/trump-kim-and-the-nuclear-status-quo/) - By Robert C. Koehler Peace, love and Donald Trump? I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong-un reached last week, but not the cynicism — not the outright dismissal. It’s too easy to hate Trump, but he isn’t the point. In his reckless unpredictability — in his lust
- [The Great Waking Up](http://commonwonders.com/the-great-waking-up/) - By Robert C. Koehler I don’t blame all of the planet’s ills on the Republican Party, but I find hope in the possibility that it’s on the verge of collapse. I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking deep vision of humanity: a sense of who we are and how we impact Planet Earth and all
- [The American Way of War: Evolution Stops Here](http://commonwonders.com/the-american-way-of-war-evolution-stops-here/) - By Robert C. Koehler America does what it wants. This is obvious, except it’s also monstrously unnerving. Let’s at least add some quote marks: “America” does what it wants — this secretly defined, self-obsessed, unelected entity that purports to be the United States of America, all 325 million of us, but is, in fact, a
- [Empowering Kids Instead of Arming Them](http://commonwonders.com/empowering-kids-instead-of-arming-them/) - By Robert C. Koehler Let’s open the classroom doors — all of them. Open up the schools, open up America, looking for the lost souls. “Woo hoo!” he shouted as he fired off his guns. By the time he was done, ten more people were dead. Eight students, two teachers. More sacred lives tossed to
- [Two Prongs of a Pitchfork](http://commonwonders.com/two-prongs-of-a-pitchfork/) - By Robert C. Koehler Such gentle abhorrence! It almost doesn’t seem like racism. “But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English,
- [Let the Prayer Continue](http://commonwonders.com/let-the-prayer-continue/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . may all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws but
- [Peace and the Nuclear Paradox](http://commonwonders.com/peace-and-the-nuclear-paradox/) - By Robert C. Koehler Whenever the topic is nuclear weapons, I remain in a state of disbelief that we can talk about them “strategically” — that language allows us to maintain such a distance from the reality of what they do, we can casually debate their use. Consider, in the context of the sudden rush
- [Can We Unlock the Golden Door?](http://commonwonders.com/can-we-unlock-the-golden-door/) - By Robert C. Koehler Around 9 a.m., a helicopter began circling overhead. Moments later, as Jonathan Blitzer wrote recently in the New Yorker, a fleet of cars pulled up outside the meat-processing plant in Bean Station, Tenn. . . . And the SS guys stepped out. Oh wait, I mean the ICE agents, who swarmed
- [Playing War in Syria](http://commonwonders.com/playing-war-in-syria/) - By Robert C. Koehler Donald Trump got “presidential” again and fired about $150 million worth of cruise missiles at Syria, accomplishing God knows what. Meanwhile, the United States, in its humanitarian largesse, has so far allowed 11 Syrian refugees into the country this year, of the more than 5 million external refugees the country’s civil
- [Lynchings Past and Present](http://commonwonders.com/lynchings-past-and-present/) - By Robert C. Koehler When history is looked at in its complexity, it plays havoc with the present moment. “This wasn’t done by the Klan, or people who had to wear a mask. This was done by teachers and clergy and law enforcement officers.” This is Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, talking to
- [Rethinking the Whole Country](http://commonwonders.com/rethinking-the-whole-country/) - By Robert C. Koehler Repeal and replace? How about the Second Amendment? “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Setting aside the antique strangeness of the wording, isn’t it time to give thought to the values
- [Change Is Coming](http://commonwonders.com/change-is-coming/) - By Robert C. Koehler The cries of loss and anguish become public, at last. A million young people seize the truth: “Half of my seventh grade class was affected by gun violence. My own brother was shot in the head. I am tired of being asked to calm down and be quiet.” The stories went
- [Normalizing Violence](http://commonwonders.com/normalizing-violence/) - By Robert C. Koehler Addressing the Parkland shootings last month, and the apparent emergence of a movement for tougher, saner gun laws that has followed, a USA Today article asked: “What has been so different from all the other mass shootings over the years?” In one sense, this is a reasonable question. Why now? Why
- [Breaking the ICE](http://commonwonders.com/breaking-the-ice/) - By Robert Koehler Perhaps the best political news of the Trump era has been the emergence of sanctuary cities — city governments valuing the presence of immigrants and standing for the protection of their right to live without fear — and their defiance of this country’s current manifestation of legal racism. “How dare you vilify
- [It's Time  To Disarm the Gun Debate](http://commonwonders.com/its-time-to-disarm-the-gun-debate/) - By Robert C. Koehler The “gun debate” is the national schism that seemingly cannot be bridged. Those on one side see the loosely regulated presence of 300 million firearms in this country as a threat to everyone’s safety and gasp in ongoing disbelief when the gun lobby smirks that the solution to every mass killing
- [Melting the Ice in the Human Heart](http://commonwonders.com/melting-the-ice-in-the-human-heart/) - By Robert C. Koehler How close, how intimate, have you ever gotten with Greenland? A new documentary called Stella Polaris, directed by Yatri Niehaus — part of Chicago’s tenth annual Peace on Earth Film Festival — takes you on a meditative journey to this lonely, extraordinary island, to its melting ice, its rampaging waters and
- [The Cheapening of Human Life](http://commonwonders.com/the-cheapening-of-human-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler The cries of terror and disbelief continue. Teenagers lie down in front of the White House to protest the nation’s tepid, stalled gun-control legislation. Parents grieve for their children and stare at the wound carved into the American soul. Assault rifles have more rights than schoolchildren. A movement simmers, or so
- [War and Poverty: A Compromise with Hell](http://commonwonders.com/war-and-poverty-a-compromise-with-hell/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s so easy to paper over the real American security void with verbiage about strength vs. weakness and the endless need to upgrade the military. Here’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for instance, quoted the other day in The Guardian: “It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force
- [The Other Superpower?](http://commonwonders.com/the-other-superpower/) - By Robert C. Koehler “I’m so honored to be alive at such a miraculous time in history. I’m so moved by what’s going on in our world today.” This was 2003. The words were those of Robert Muller — the other one, the one from Costa Rica, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations
- [Discovering Fire](http://commonwonders.com/discovering-fire/) - “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Egyptians lock arms, a dictator tumbles. Let’s think about this, shall we? How could such a thing have happened? I ask this knowing the hard part is just beginning. The hard part is always just beginning.
- [Righting the Balance of Power: Peace on Earth Film Festival 2011](http://commonwonders.com/righting-the-balance-of-power-peace-of-earth-film-festival-2011/) - “I only remember a couple of more gunshots and then everything got quiet. Just as it all started it all just stopped. It felt like an eternity before the police got to our door and tried to open it up and they couldn’t open up the door. They had to ask for help from inside because there were bodies in the way.” So . . . this, unavoidably, is how we have to think about peace — with horrific instances of its obvious absence. It’s not the only place to start, but somehow it seems right to start here, maybe in order not to stop here. The words are those of Colin Goddard, one of the students wounded in the Virginia Tech shootings of April 1
- [The National Empathy Divide](http://commonwonders.com/the-national-empathy-divide/) - “The loose network among relatives offers the grim solace of knowing that others too have suffered the same curse.” Every terrible rift is the occasion for peace and the place for the peacemaker. And often peace is nothing more, at first, than connecting, pulling the injured or ostracized back into the social circle and beginning
- [Spiritual Death](http://commonwonders.com/spiritual-death/) - The easy violence of empire washes over everything. It washes into our psyches. I’m thinking about this in connection with the juxtaposition of anniversaries this week: Martin Luther King Day; President Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in 1961, in which he sounded the warning about the military-industrial complex; and George H.W. Bush’s bombing campaign that launched the Gulf War in 1991, pounding not only Saddam (our kill ratio was 1,000-to-1) but also the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” and America’s post-modernist aversion to war, thus re-energizing . . . the military-industrial complex.
- [The Paradox of Disarmament](http://commonwonders.com/the-paradox-of-disarmament/) - We witness another impromptu festival of American violence, this one in front of a Tucson Safeway. One more place that used to be safe and ordinary, suitable for children, is suddenly, for one random moment, a free-fire zone. A 9-year-old girl who wanted to learn how government works is among the half dozen dead. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head, fights for her life. What do we do now, other than shrug, shudder, grieve?
- [Drone Reporting](http://commonwonders.com/drone-reporting/) - For me, it always comes back to the media and the moral values implicit in throwaway news stories — the ones we barely notice as we move through our day. “A series of missile strikes killed at least 19 suspected insurgents Saturday in Pakistan's tribal borderlands, signaling that the new year would bring no respite in a relentless campaign of U.S. attacks employing unmanned aerial drones to target militants.”
- [Common Enemies](http://commonwonders.com/common-enemies/) - By Robert Koehler (Originally published April 10, 2003) This is the drumbeat of “the other superpower”: “Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war.” Words with lesser resonance wouldn’t pull the world out of its torpor. Equivocation
- [Yemen's Crisis Belongs to All of Us](http://commonwonders.com/yemens-crisis-belongs-to-all-of-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler What’s a little cholera — excuse me, the worst outbreak of this preventable disease in modern history — compared to the needs of a smoothly functioning economy? A week before he was kicked out of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet for allegedly having watched pornography on his government computer, former
- [Governing by Scapegoat](http://commonwonders.com/governing-by-scapegoat/) - By Robert C. Koehler Got a problem? Simplify and project. When you have a country to govern and you have no idea what to do — and, even more to the core of the matter, you also have a crony-agenda you want to push quietly past the populace — there’s a time-proven technique that generally
- [The Wisdom of Mass Salvation](http://commonwonders.com/the-wisdom-of-mass-salvation/) - By Robert C. Koehler Incoming! Incoming! Uh . . . pardon me while I interrupt this false alarm to quote Martin Luther King: “Science investigates,” he says in The Strength To Love, “religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals
- [The Sanctity of Life](http://commonwonders.com/the-sanctity-of-life/) - By Robert C. Koehler Breathe deeply, suck in your fear, value life. Some psycho-pranksters have made this national conversation unavoidable. The game is called “swatting”: Call the cops, report a terrifying emergency — “they’re holding my mother hostage!” — and wait for the fun to start. A SWAT team swings into action. Police surround a
- [The Button, the Wall and the Myth of Nations](http://commonwonders.com/the-button-the-wall-and-the-myth-of-nations/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Mr. Kim may be partly motivated by an intense need to roll back sanctions that, by all accounts, have begun to bite.” Whoa and ouch. This was my wakeup paragraph. I was sitting at Starbucks, reading the New York Times, feeling confusing old emotions wash over me on the first day
- [Peace on the Far Side of Nuclear Weapons](http://commonwonders.com/peace-on-the-far-side-of-nuclear-weapons/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . real security can only be shared . . .” I call it news in a cage: the fact that the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In other words, how nice, but it has nothing to do with the real
- [Rebuilding Jim Crow Nation](http://commonwonders.com/rebuilding-jim-crow-nation/) - By Robert C. Koehler Dred Scott lives! With the Supreme Court’s declaration that President Trump’s third version of a Muslim travel ban is now enforceable, even as legal challenges against it proceed, the court and the country reopen the racism that permeates American history. “The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were
- [Reopening the Doors of Perception](http://commonwonders.com/reopening-the-doors-of-perception/) - By Robert C. Koehler In a time of endless war and triumphant cynicism, I found myself the other day unexpectedly walking through the doors of perception. Yeah, those doors. “You know the day destroys the night/Night divides the day/Tried to run/Tried to hide/ Break on through to the other side . . .” The words,
- [Empowering the Vulnerable](http://commonwonders.com/empowering-the-vulnerable/) - By Robert C. Koehler OK, here’s a good one: What’s the position of women in the antiwar movement? This was circa 1967, when I was a college kid just coming of age, psychologically and politically. I was a hippie. I had stopped cutting my hair. I’d discovered pot. And I was outraged by the Vietnam
- [Trapped in a 'Man's World'](http://commonwonders.com/trapped-in-a-mans-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . . The “man’s world” I grew up in is shattering into fragments of shame, contrition and desperate denial. Allegations of sexual harassment and abuse are catching up with powerful perps, sometimes decades after the fact. On Capitol Hill, we now know about
- [The Illusion of Armed Salvation](http://commonwonders.com/the-illusion-of-armed-salvation/) - By Robert C. Koehler This time, the “the fire and the fury” of American mass murder erupted in church. Twenty-six people were killed, including children, one only 18 months old. How do we stroke their memory? How do we move forward? This is bigger than gun control. We should begin, I think, by envisioning a
- [Bureaucracy vs. Humanity](http://commonwonders.com/2614-2/) - By Robert C. Koehler Basically, it’s kidnapping. Were the Border Patrol agents wearing MAGA hats when they grabbed Rosa Maria Hernandez as she left her hospital room? “It’s a shocking case — the most outrageous case I’ve ever seen. Is it a preview of things to come?” ACLU attorney Michael Tan said to me about
- [Praying for the Moths and Beetles](http://commonwonders.com/praying-for-the-moths-and-beetles/) - By Robert C. Koehler “. . . insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them.” And instantly I’m beyond the realm of anything I know, as I consider the gradual disappearance not of whales but of . . . beetles, moths and
- [A Country, and a Future, Worth Serving](http://commonwonders.com/a-country-and-a-future-worth-serving/) - By Robert C. Koehler America’s endless war quietly moves across the broken nations of the world. Every so often, U.S. soldiers die, as four Green Berets did several weeks ago in . . . Niger. And the news was more about the adequacy of presidential condolences to the families of the slain soldiers than the
- [The Calm Before the Storm](http://commonwonders.com/the-calm-before-the-storm/) - By Robert C. Koehler Every time Donald Trump blurts or tweets a shocker — “maybe it’s the calm before the storm,” for instance — questions flood the media. Is he serious? What did he mean? Yes, of course, but beyond these, larger questions hover half-asked, cutting into the soul of who we are. This is
- [The Violence Comes Home Again](http://commonwonders.com/the-violence-comes-home-again/) - By Robert C. Koehler In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, as in the wake of all the high-profile mass shootings that preceded it, the big question looms: Why? John Whitehead puts the question this way: “What is it about America that makes violence our nation’s calling card?” This is the enormous question —
- [The Courage To Kneel](http://commonwonders.com/the-courage-to-kneel/) - By Robert C. Koehler Kneel, touch the earth. “Oh say can you see . . . ” The anthem starts. I can feel the courage . . . of Colin Kaepernick, the (then) San Francisco 49ers quarterback who refused to stand for the national war hymn, not when one of the wars was directed at
- [Democracy Lite](http://commonwonders.com/democracy-lite/) - By Robert Koehler (The column was written in October 2002) Looks almost like the real thing, this processed governance product for the new millennium — “democracy lite,” you might call it. Comes with elected representatives, a mass media, bunting, hoopla and the same soaring ideals as the Lincolnesque version. Caution: Democracy lite has nothing to
- [Reclaiming the Truth about Vietnam](http://commonwonders.com/reclaiming-the-truth-about-vietnam/) - By Robert C. Koehler “From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans
- [Begging for War](http://commonwonders.com/begging-for-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler “There are no good options,” Brian Williams said the other night on MSNBC, launching a discussion about North Korea with the implication that war — maybe nuclear war — is the only solution to the problem it represents. We’ve been cradling our own suicide for seven decades. The baby’s eyes open
- [Facing History in the Age of Trump](http://commonwonders.com/facing-history-in-the-age-of-trump/) - By Robert C. Koehler Tempting as it is to isolate Donald Trump as the worst president in history (and “worst” is putting it mildly . . . more like the most narcissistically infantile, the most Nazi-friendly), doing so achieves nothing beyond a fleeting sense of satisfaction. Yeah, he’s scary. His supporters are scary. But he
- [Why Does North Korea Hate Us?](http://commonwonders.com/why-does-north-korea-hate-us/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless . . .” And so we return to the Korean War, when North Korea was carpet-bombed to the edge of existence. The American media doesn’t have a memory that stretches quite so far back, at least not under present circumstances. One commentator at MSNBC
- [Terrorism for Profit](http://commonwonders.com/terrorism-for-profit/) - By Robert C. Koehler Donald Trump stands cluelessly at the edge of history, exemplifying everything wrong with the past, oh, 10,000 years or so. The necessity for fundamental change in humanity’s global organization is not only profound, but urgent. Trump’s latest outburst about North Korea’s nukes — threatening that country “with fire, fury, and frankly
- [Opening Gitmo to the World](http://commonwonders.com/opening-gitmo-to-the-world/) - By Robert C. Koehler To read Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo is to run your mind along the contours of hell. The next step, if you’re an American, is to embrace it. Claim it. This is who we are: We are the proprietors of a cluster of human cages and a Kafkaesque
- [Dead Civilians and the Language of War](http://commonwonders.com/dead-civilians-and-the-language-of-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler Finally it comes down to this: Some people are expendable. In certain parts of the world — where we and our allies are waging war — the expendable people come in two categories: terrorists (good riddance!) and civilians, whom we only kill if and when necessary, and whose deaths often elicit
- [Nukes and the Global Schism](http://commonwonders.com/nukes-and-the-global-schism/) - By Robert C. Koehler The United States boycotted the U.N. negotiations to ban — everywhere across Planet Earth — nuclear weapons. So did a few other countries. Guess which ones? The international debate over this historic treaty, which became reality a week ago by a margin of 122 to 1, revealed how deeply split the
- [Skewing Democracy White](http://commonwonders.com/skewing-democracy-white/) - By Robert C. Koehler Every real problem this country — and this planet — face is replaced by a fantasy problem, which all the powers of government then pretend to address. Meet Donald Trump, master of the street con, trickster extraordinaire. How many cabinet positions and high-level government posts have been filled by someone whose
- [The Fire Burns, the Caldron Bubbles](http://commonwonders.com/the-fire-burns-the-caldron-bubbles/) - By Robert C. Koehler America serves up its news in a caldron from hell, or so it sometimes seems. The fragments are all simmering in the same juice: bombs and drones and travel bans, slashed health care, police shootings, the Confederate flag. Double, double, toil and trouble . . . Suddenly I’m thinking about the
- [When the Detainee Is American . . .](http://commonwonders.com/when-the-detainee-is-american/) - By Robert C. Koehler The corpses pile up like sandbags along the planet’s geopolitical borders. “Perhaps his condition deteriorated and the authorities decided it was better to release him in a coma than as a corpse.” So said an expert on North Korea recently, quoted in the New York Times following the death of 22-year-old
- [Uprooting the N-Word](http://commonwonders.com/uprooting-the-n-word/) - By Robert C. Koehler The word, inappropriately uttered, has the news value of a bullet fired off at the mall. One word. It’s the ticking time bomb of American history. It pulsates with paradox. I want to take a moment to honor at least that: the paradox. How come its meaning changes depending on who
- [A Dying Man's Gift of Awareness](http://commonwonders.com/a-dying-mans-gift-of-awareness/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them . . .” These words are also part of the geopolitics of murder — these words of light and hope, alive and pulsing amid the bullet casings, the blood and wreckage, the shattered
- [Strip and Flip: Democracy in a Cage](http://commonwonders.com/strip-and-flip-democracy-in-a-cage/) - By Robert C. Koehler The wound burst open in November. History, suddenly, could no longer be avoided. Reality could no longer be avoided. American democracy is flawed, polluted, gamed by the oligarchs. It always has been. But not until the election process whelped Donald Trump did it become so unbearably obvious. Welcome to The Strip
- [Cancer with Political Clout](http://commonwonders.com/cancer-with-political-clout/) - By Robert C. Koehler A suicide bomber inflicts hell at a concert hall in Manchester, England that’s full of children, as though that was the point — to murder children. The horror of war . . . well, terrorism . . . doesn’t get any worse. And the media, as they focus on the spectacle
- [Hostage to the Rules of Espionage](http://commonwonders.com/hostage-to-the-rules-of-espionage/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria” . . . and “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.” Welcome to the last paragraph of a Washington Post story the other day, a loose fragment of news, a homeless
- ['Classified' America](http://commonwonders.com/classified-america/) - By Robert C. Koehler For a journalist — especially one covering government and politics — the most suspicious, least trustworthy word in the language ought to be: “classified.” As the drama continues to swirl around Russiagate, or whatever the central controversy of the Trump administration winds up being known as, that word keeps popping up,
- [Drumming for Planet Earth](http://commonwonders.com/drumming-for-planet-earth/) - By Robert C. Koehler At the climate rally in Chicago last week, people started drumming in the rain. Pardon me while I walk uncertain ground here, looking for clues and connections in a smattering of unlikely places. The world is in a fragile, dangerous place. We need to create peace, fairness and sustainability. We need
- [A Public Plan for Peace](http://commonwonders.com/a-public-plan-for-peace/) - By Robert C. Koehler The American will to wage war — endless war, pointless war, total war — is, I fear, impervious to public opinion and even political action. It remains alive deep in the underground bunker of American militarism, protected from sanity. This goes beyond the staying power of our loser generals, who have
- [Beyond Redemptive Violence](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-redemptive-violence/) - By Robert C. Koehler Sometimes our tame and compliant media upchucks a piece of truth. For instance: “American officials had predicted that the missile strike would result in a major shift in Assad’s calculus, but the U.S. attack appeared to be symbolic in reality. Within 24 hours of the strike, monitoring groups reported that warplanes
- [The Mental Limits of War](http://commonwonders.com/the-mental-limits-of-war/) - By Robert C. Koehler A Morning Consult poll winks at me from my inbox: 57 percent of Americans support more airstrikes in Syria. My eyeballs roll. Hopelessness permeates me, especially because I’m hardly surprised, but still . . . come on. This is nuts. The poll could be about the next move in a Call
- [Caligula with Orange Hair](http://commonwonders.com/caligula-with-orange-hair/) - By Robert C. Koehler So maybe this is how the U.S. demilitarizes, or the American public at least returns to the consciousness of the late ’60s, when protests rocked the streets and people demanded an end to the savagery in Vietnam: Donald Trump, the Fool in the Tarot deck, the harbinger of change, removes the
- [How Many Civilians Can We Kill?](http://commonwonders.com/how-many-civilians-can-we-kill/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The wooden carts that residents use to carry vegetables and other wares in the once busy market area instead ferried out cadavers recovered from the rubble last week.” And so . . . another “precision” bomb strike in America’s war against terror. This was the scene in Mosul earlier this month,
- [The Mosque That Disappeared](http://commonwonders.com/the-mosque-that-disappeared/) - By Robert C. Koehler We committed a quiet little war crime the other day. Forty-plus people are dead, taken out with Hellfire missiles while they were praying. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just insurgents. The women and children, if there were any, were . . . come on, you know the lingo, collateral damage.
- [The Deep State Hasn't Gone Away](http://commonwonders.com/the-deep-state-hasnt-gone-away/) - By Robert C. Koehler “In a statement to WikiLeaks, the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public . . .” Let me interrupt this quote from the world’s declassifier in chief, regarding its latest release of impertinent, humiliating and shocking data about the American security state, simply to
- [The Moment of the Fool](http://commonwonders.com/the-moment-of-the-fool/) - By Robert C. Koehler Obama . . . Trump. Could there be a bigger contrast — in attitude, style, comportment, philosophy? What irony that the two names are now linked in history: Donald Trump forever the successor to Barack Obama, forever the orange-haired blot on his legacy, forever the surrealistic next chapter of the American
- [A Crisis of Relevance](http://commonwonders.com/a-crisis-of-relevance/) - By Robert C. Koehler And the word of the moment is . . . opportunity: “What unites our party is a belief in opportunity, the idea that however you started out, whatever you look like, whoever you love, America is the place you can make it if you try.” Could you be any more tepid?
- [Costa Rica's Peace Journey](http://commonwonders.com/costa-ricas-peace-journey/) - By Robert C. Koehler “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have
- [The Great American Awakening](http://commonwonders.com/the-great-american-awakening/) - By Robert C. Koehler Old wounds break open. Deep, encrusted wrongs are suddenly visible. The streets flow with anger and solidarity. The past and the future meet. The news is All Trump, All the Time, but what’s really happening is only minimally about Donald Trump, even though his outrageous actions and bizarre alliances are the
- [The Mass Grave We Call Collateral Damage](http://commonwonders.com/the-mass-grave-we-call-collateral-damage/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?” We have carnage and we have irony. The speaker is the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares
- [Creating Enemies, Creating Hell](http://commonwonders.com/creating-enemies-creating-hell/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Numerous foreign-born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism-related crimes since September 11, 2001.” As Donald Trump sets out to “protect America,” I dedicate the words of his explosively controversial proclamation banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, to one of his supporters: Alexandre Bissonnette, the
- [The Birth of a Movement](http://commonwonders.com/the-birth-of-a-movement/) - By Robert C. Koehler The sense of resistance was fierce: “Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . . But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young
- [Tomorrow Is Today](http://commonwonders.com/tomorrow-is-today/) - By Robert C. Koehler The icon’s day has come and gone, and — oh, the irony — eight people were fatally shot in Chicago on his weekend. Another eight were shot during a Martin Luther King rally and celebration in Miami. God knows how many more died this past weekend: around the country, around the
- [War Consciousness and the F-35](http://commonwonders.com/war-consciousness-and-the-f-35/) - By Robert C. Koehler “The F-35 Lightning II Program (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter Program) is the Department of Defense’s focal point for defining affordable next generation strike aircraft weapon systems for the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and our allies. The F-35 will bring cutting-edge technologies to the battlespace of the future.” Lurking
- [Leaving the Age of Disconnect](http://commonwonders.com/leaving-the-age-of-disconnect/) - By Robert C. Koehler It’s too easy simply to blame Donald Trump for the void that’s suddenly apparent at the center of American government — or will be on Jan. 20. In fact, I’m utterly sick of hearing his name, let alone accounts of his latest outrage or trivial impertinence, which is the equivalent of
- [Pledging Allegiance](http://commonwonders.com/pledging-allegiance/) - By Robert C. Koehler I pledge allegiance to . . . what? The Electoral College, to no one’s serious surprise, voted Donald Trump in as the nation’s 45th president, and the pot of outrage in the American spectator democracy begins to boil. No, no, no, no, no, no, no — no to all his right-wing
- [A Party of Transcendence](http://commonwonders.com/a-party-of-transcendence/) - By Robert C. Koehler As we think about the election — what went wrong, what’s been unleashed and what we should do about it — please, please, let us expand our vision beyond some technical fix or updated “message.” Even if we’re talking about the Democratic Party. James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute
- [Trump, Taiwan and the Weapons Deal](http://commonwonders.com/trump-taiwan-and-the-weapons-deal/) - By Robert C. Koehler The president-elect stumbles over the protocols of geopolitics and war, tweeting all the way. It’s not just insane. It’s awkward. “Since 1979,” the Guardian points out, “the U.S. has acknowledged Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, with relations governed by the ‘One China’ set of protocols.” But here’s what
- [Vote Recount vs. the Media Consensus](http://commonwonders.com/vote-recount-vs-the-media-consensus/) - By Robert C. Koehler The impatience across much of the media is palpable. Recount? Oh groan. That’s not going to change the election results. The consensus “truth” writhing just below the surface of the mainstream, eyeball-rolling disapproval of Jill Stein’s call for and financing of a presidential vote recount in Wisconsin (and perhaps in Pennsylvania
- [Bending the Arc](http://commonwonders.com/bending-the-arc/) - By Robert C. Koehler Maybe this much is true. Donald Trump, pseudo-president-elect, loser of the real election, charismatic stump-speech populist whose actual ability to govern may well be non-existent, has inflicted significant damage on America’s political infrastructure. This is scary, of course, but not necessarily a bad thing. I say this even, or especially, if
- [Election Theft and Racist Elitism](http://commonwonders.com/election-theft-and-racist-elitism/) - By Robert C. Koehler “All great changes,” said Deepak Chopra, “are preceded by chaos.” That starts to get at it — how to understand, and start healing, the national wound inflicted on this country, and the world, by the 2016 presidential election. But I need to throw in a little John Oliver as well. “We
- [A Nation Up for Grabs](http://commonwonders.com/a-nation-up-for-grabs/) - By Robert C. Koehler And so we are a nation up for grabs. Racist populism trounces . . . uh, trumps . . . platitudes about America’s greatness. Hillary Clinton, though slightly ahead in the popular vote, is defeated in the Electoral College. Like it or not, change is not deferred. It’s here, in our
- [Democracy and Our Vulnerable Future](http://commonwonders.com/democracy-and-our-vulnerable-future/) - By Robert C. Koehler It was a moment as tiny as marking a ballot — those two minutes of the second debate, when the presidential election hung suspended mid-diatribe and the candidates let go of their opponent’s flaws long enough to honor a bit of common humanity. No big deal. Yeah, I know. But as
- [Budgeting the Good War, for 75 Years](http://commonwonders.com/budgeting-the-good-war-for-75-years/) - By Robert C. Koehler World War II never quite ended — it morphed. Today we call it the status quo, or endless war, or we just don’t bother to notice it. Indeed, now more than ever we don’t notice it. It’s barely part of the 2016 election, even though we’re engaged in active conflict in
- [Commander in Chief](http://commonwonders.com/commander-in-chief/) - By Robert Koehler Maybe it’s the phrase — “commander in chief” — that best captures the transcendent absurdity and unaddressed horrors of the 2016 election season and the business as usual that will follow. I don’t want to elect anyone commander in chief: not the xenophobic misogynist and egomaniac, not the Henry Kissinger acolyte and
- [Nuclear Standoff](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-standoff/) - By Robert C. Koehler Values the size of Planet Earth are at stake, as the American presidential election grows ever smaller, ever pettier, ever more certain that rancor triumphs over relevance. Can you imagine, let us say, an issue the size of global nuclear disarmament emerging in this race, somewhere between the groper tapes and
- [The Politics of Fear](http://commonwonders.com/the-politics-of-fear/) - “This politics of fear has actually delivered everything we were afraid of.” Well, OK, let’s think about these words of Jill Stein for a moment, as the 2016 presidential race enters, oh Lord, it’s final month — and the possibility still looms that this country could elect a hybrid of Benito Mussolini and Jim Crow its next, uh, commander in chief.
- [The Debate: They Both Bombed It](http://commonwonders.com/the-debate-they-both-bombed-it/) - Painful, stupid, trite . . . America! There was more than one loser in the big debate, but that’s no surprise. I hardly expected any issues of substance to get serious air time, let alone intelligent commentary, in Monday’s 90-minute presidential race spectacle, but something — something — matters here enormously.
- [The Amateur](http://commonwonders.com/audio-test/)
- [Haunted House](http://commonwonders.com/haunted-house/)
- [The Sand Man](http://commonwonders.com/the-sand-man/)
- [Guardian Angles](http://commonwonders.com/guardian-angles/)
- [Secure Birth](http://commonwonders.com/secure-birth/)
- [All the time in the world](http://commonwonders.com/all-the-time-in-the-world/)
- [Back to normal](http://commonwonders.com/back-to-normal/)
- [Dance of life](http://commonwonders.com/dance-of-life/)
- [Hooray for junk](http://commonwonders.com/hooray-for-junk/)
- [Poetry sandbox](http://commonwonders.com/poetry-sandbox/)
- [Stop the Killing](http://commonwonders.com/stop-the-killing/) - Maybe half a million dead, half a country — 10 million people — displaced from their homes, jettisoned onto the mercy of the world. Welcome to war. Welcome to Syria.
- [The Future Cries Out: 'Water Is Life'](http://commonwonders.com/the-future-cries-out-water-is-life/) - The dogs growl, the pepper spray bites, the bulldozers tear up the soil. “Water is life!” they cry. “Water is life!” This isn’t Flint, Michigan, but I feel the presence of its suffering in this cry of outrage at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. No more, no more. You will not poison our water or continue ravaging Planet Earth: mocking its sacredness, destroying its eco-diversity, reshaping and slowly killing it for profit.
- [War vs. Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/war-vs-democracy/) - The paradox of democracy is that it depends on the integrity of those who have the most to lose if an election goes the wrong way — you know, the people in power. That’s a particularly thorny dilemma when the “fourth estate” — the speakers of truth to power, the public’s counterforce against political hackdom — are basically corporate wimps who view their job as the voice of public relations for the status quo, the defenders of our conventional beliefs, e.g., that God’s in his heaven and America is the world’s oldest, greatest, most secure democracy.
- [Reflections on the Anthropocene](http://commonwonders.com/reflections-on-the-anthropocene/) - “However these debates will unfold, the Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet.” This is a little too big to simply call “news.” Indeed, I can’t move beyond these words — especially that heart-stopper, “intertwined” — until I’m able to summon sufficient inner quiet and humility. Geologically, the paradigm has already shifted. How about spiritually?
- [The Heart of Order](http://commonwonders.com/the-heart-of-order/) - By Robert C. Koehler He’d left the water running, flooding neighbors’ apartments. He’d been running around outside naked. By the time police arrived, he was standing in the window of his fourth-floor apartment on Farwell Avenue — a few blocks from where I live in the diverse, unpredictable Chicago neighborhood called Rogers Park — threatening
- [Beyond Winning and Losing](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-winning-and-losing/) - It’s the smallest thing in the world. Does the tennis ball land inside the line or outside? But somehow, as I watched this 60-second YouTube clip of an Australian tennis match last January, and heard an explosion of joyous approval surge from the crowd, I could feel the planet shift. Or at least it seemed that way for an instant.
- [The Nuclear Breakfast Menu](http://commonwonders.com/the-nuclear-breakfast-menu/) - Donald Trump is a reckless fool. But the U.S. defense establishment is M.A.D. And herein lies one of the darker problems with the Trump candidacy, and the reason why so many establishment conservatives are awkwardly distancing themselves from America’s leading narcissist — if not running screaming into the night in fear for their lives (and everyone else’s).
- [Reaching Beyond the Candidates](http://commonwonders.com/reaching-beyond-the-candidates/) - What would it take to cause Hillary Clinton to distance herself from the newly launched bombing campaign in Libya? Or call for a congressional debate on it? Or suggest the obvious: that the war on terror isn’t working? Of course it won’t happen. But the fact that it sounds so absurd — almost as fanciful as the notion of movie characters stepping off the screen into real life — indicates how illusory, how unglued from reality, American democracy is at the presidential level. It’s a spectator sport — mud wrestling, say — doled out to us as entertainment by the media in sound bites and poll numbers.
- [Slavery, War and Presidential Politics](http://commonwonders.com/slavery-war-and-presidential-politics/) - As I watched “unity” take hold of the Democratic Party this week, the believer in me wanted to imbibe it — bottoms up. Michelle Obama ignited the crowd. “That is the story of this country,” she said. “The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done.”
- [Volatile America](http://commonwonders.com/volatile-america/) - In a flash I thought, oh God, the civil war has started. Then the headlines shifted and, for the moment, “normalcy” returned. It’s a Trump-sated normalcy that’s anything but, of course, and the most recent heavily reported violence (at least as I write these words) — the murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge — blends into the endlessly simmering turmoil known as the United States of America.
- [The God of War](http://commonwonders.com/the-god-of-war/) - There’s Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama: “By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you — strangers — you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.”
- [The Illusion of Security](http://commonwonders.com/the-illusion-of-security/) - “Please be gentle.” The story is too easy to believe. At the Memphis airport, a confused, nervous teenager sets off the metal detector — possibly because she has sequins on her shirt — and is told she needs to come to a “sterile area.” Armed guards show up to escort her. She’s terrified.
- [The Right To Bear Courage](http://commonwonders.com/the-right-to-bear-courage/) - Behind the “right to bear arms” lies concealed the right to make money. You know, a lot of it. The right to . . . I pause here, torn apart by the political sacredness of these words. We have the right to speak freely and worship the God or our choosing or none at all, the right to reasonable privacy, the right to choose our leaders, the right to fair and equal treatment under the law. These rights are inscribed in the national bedrock: the Constitution. They activate our humanity; without them, we’re so much less than our fullest selves. Without them we’re perpetual victims, forced to live in fear and secrecy.
- [Hair-Trigger Alert](http://commonwonders.com/hair-trigger-alert/) - I feel the finger on the trigger. I also feel it on the button. “Dear President Obama,” the letter begins. It goes on to remind him of something he said in his 2008 presidential campaign: “Keeping nuclear weapons ready to launch on a moment’s notice is a dangerous relic of the Cold War. Such policies increase the risk of catastrophic accidents or miscalculation.”
- [Mass Karma](http://commonwonders.com/mass-karma/) - This won’t be the last. Half a week into the Orlando tragedy, this reality remains pretty much unacknowledged, as cause-seekers focus on security and ISIS and the specific mental instability of Omar Mateen, who, as the world knows, took 49 precious lives and injured 53 others at the nightclub Pulse in the early hours of June 12.
- [School Days and Grenade Launchers](http://commonwonders.com/school-days-and-grenade-launchers/) - Come on, they aren’t tanks, they’re armored rescue vehicles. And the, uh, grenade launchers would only be used to launch teargas canisters. When necessary. And the M-16s? Standard police issue. What a journey these Los Angeles teenagers, and the civil rights group Fight for the Soul of the Cities, had, to get from there — the ho-hum justification by (good Lord) the city’s school district police force, for the accumulation of surplus Defense Department weaponry — to here:
- [Poverty, Militarism and the Public Schools](http://commonwonders.com/poverty-militarism-and-the-public-schools/) - What’s the difference between education and obedience? If you see very little, you probably have no problem with the militarization of the American school system — or rather, the militarization of the impoverished schools . . . the ones that can’t afford new textbooks or functional plumbing, much less art supplies or band equipment. The Pentagon has been eyeing these schools — broken and gang-ridden — for a decade now, and seeing its future there. It comes in like a cammy-clad Santa, bringing money and discipline. In return it gets young minds to shape, to (I fear) possess: to turn into the next generation of soldiers, available for the coming wars.
- [A 10-Minute Debate on War](http://commonwonders.com/a-10-minute-debate-on-war/) - “Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly, possibly . . .” This is — who else? — Donald Trump, flexing, you might say, his nuclear trigger finger in an interview with Chris Matthews, who responds in alarm:
- [Quiet War, Sleeping Nation](http://commonwonders.com/quiet-war-sleeping-nation/) - And the race goes on. So does the war, but you’d never know that the one had anything to do with the other. Even when the mainstream media trouble themselves to acknowledge that the primary season remains open on the Democratic side, that Bernie Sanders — and his millions of supporters — are still in the race, the Bernie revolution is never portrayed as addressing foreign policy and the still-failing, still-catastrophic war on terror.
- [Cowardice and Exoneration in Kunduz](http://commonwonders.com/2308-2/) - “The people are being reduced to blood and dust. They are in pieces.” The doctor who uttered these words still thought the hospital itself was a safe zone. He was with Doctors Without Borders, working in Kunduz, Afghanistan, where the Taliban and government forces were engaged in hellish fighting and civilians, as always, were caught in the middle. The wounded, including children, had been flowing in all week, and the staff were unrelieved in their duties, working an unending shift.
- [Opening the Closed Political Culture](http://commonwonders.com/opening-the-closed-political-culture/) - The headline, from the Los Angeles Times, hit me like a sucker punch: “Voters’ ‘Bernie or Bust’ efforts persist despite Sanders’ vow not to be another Ralph Nader.” Actually, it was worse than that. When my brain cleared, I realized I was, once again, caught in a media straitjacket.
- [The New Enlightenment](http://commonwonders.com/the-new-enlightenment/) - What remains endlessly hinted at about the 2016 presidential race, but not fully articulated, is that something enormous — bigger than politics, bigger than America itself, perhaps — is trembling and kicking just below the surface, struggling to emerge. I have a name to suggest for this hypothetical phenomenon: the New Enlightenment. Nothing less than that seems adequate.
- [Creating Resilient Communities](http://commonwonders.com/creating-resilient-communities/) - “Conflict happens in isolation.” Wow, that’s it. A sense of awareness ignited as I listened to Kristin Famula, president of the National Peace Academy, make this seldom-acknowledged observation. When we feel wronged, violated, disrespected, suddenly we’re alone with our careening emotions.
- [Democracy Free-for-All](http://commonwonders.com/democracy-free-for-all/) - Here in America, we celebrate democracy by staying in touch with the lack of it. What better way to honor our ancestors’ struggles to win the right to vote — and have that vote counted — than to have to struggle ourselves for the same thing? Considering that, as I wrote four years ago, “democracy is nothing if not a perpetual nuisance to the powerful,” and that apathy is the national curse, I remain amazed that we’re having a presidential race this year that cuts so deeply — to core human values — and is worth enduring a sort of bureaucratic totalitarianism to participate in.
- [Playing with Guns](http://commonwonders.com/playing-with-guns/) - You shouldn’t play with guns, unless you do it the way “Jim” apparently did. His gun play — a (seemingly) satirical petition at change.org — has enveloped the looming Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer in awkward surrealism and forced the three Republican presidential candidates to duck for cover from their own words.
- [Recovering from Militarism](http://commonwonders.com/recovering-from-militarism/) - The pols cry glory and revenge. They cry security. They cry greatness. Then they stick in the needle, or the missile or the rifle shell, or the nuclear bomb. Or at least they imagine doing so. This will fix the world. And they approve more funding for war.
- [This Is What Democracy Looks Like](http://commonwonders.com/this-is-what-democracy-looks-like/) - By Robert C. Koehler The snaking line was more than a mile long. Thousands of us had been waiting for hours in the bitter cold to get into Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre to hear Bernie Sanders speak. It was Monday night. The Illinois and four other state primaries were the next day and, as has been
- [Politics and the Golden Rule](http://commonwonders.com/politics-and-the-golden-rule/) - “What I’m not trying to do is just pass legislation. I’m trying to change the face of American politics.” Pull these words out of the context of “the news” and let them pulse like the heartbeat of the future. The words are those of Bernie Sanders, of course — engaged last week in a confrontational interview with Chris Matthews. Free college tuition? Matthews loosed his skepticism on the presidential candidate, who pushed back:
- [War, Peace and Bernie Sanders](http://commonwonders.com/war-peace-and-bernie-sanders/) - It’s the day after the big vote and I’m doing my best to dig Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders out from beneath the pile of Super Tuesday numbers and media declarations of winners and losers. As a Boston Globe headline put it: “Clinton and Trump are now the presumptive nominees. Get used to it.”
- [Finding Peace at the Heart of Grief](http://commonwonders.com/finding-peace-at-the-heart-of-grief/) - A young, much-beloved woman was gang-raped three years ago on a bus in Delhi and a culture exploded. The documentary India’s Daughter, which addresses the horrific rape-murder and its aftermath, is part of that explosion of awareness, aimed straight at the heart of India’s cultural dismissal of women as full-fledged members of society and full-fledged human beings. It opens up a world where people can still say: “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock. A girl is far more responsible for a rape than a boy.”
- [Beached America](http://commonwonders.com/2269-2/) - For at least the last four decades now I feel like I’ve been living in Beached America: a nation that has lost its values, even as it writhes in violent agitation, inflicting its military on the vulnerable regions of the planet. It does so in the name of those lost values . . . democracy, freedom, equality. These are just dead words at this point, public relations blather, silently followed by a sigh: yada, yada, yada. Then we send in the drones.
- [Confronting Our Toxic Legacy](http://commonwonders.com/confronting-our-toxic-legacy/) - Maybe if we declared “war” on poison water, we’d find a way to invest money in its “defeat.” David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, writing at Tom Dispatch this week about what they called “The United States of Flint,” make this point: “The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.”
- [Four Horsemen of the Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/four-horsemen-of-the-democracy/) - “It was also a shock to the system that a candidate universally known in Iowa, with deep pockets and long experience, could come close to losing to a relative unknown who was initially considered little more than a protest candidate.” Just think of it! The tiny, tightly controlled consciousness that calls itself The World’s Greatest Democracy got all rattled and discombobulated by the behavior of Iowa caucus participants this week, because a large number of them — virtually half of the participating Democrats — cast their vote for an old socialist, well outside the zone of official approval.
- [Presidential Politics and the American Soul](http://commonwonders.com/presidential-politics-and-the-american-soul/) - When I want to believe that America is a democracy — indeed, to feel so deeply this is so that my soul trembles — I turn to Martin Luther King, who gave his life for it. He cried out for something so much more than a process: a game of winners and losers. He reached for humanity’s deepest yearning, for the connectedness of all people, for the transcendence of hatred and the demonization of “the other.” He spoke — half a century ago — the words that those in power couldn’t bear to hear, because his truths cut too deep and disrupted too much business as usual.
- [Evolution: The Candidate](http://commonwonders.com/evolution-the-candidate/) - “And finally, how can we make our politics reflect what’s best in us, and not what’s worst?” The president asked the right question in his State of the Union address last week. What if he’d actually answered it – or at least addressed it honestly?
- [Kayla's Legacy](http://commonwonders.com/kaylas-legacy/) - She had so little and she had so much. I didn’t know her, except for the tiny piece of her life that was revealed in the 2013 documentary Hear Our Voices, directed by David and Patricia Earnhardt, but her candid, gutsy presence in that film was sufficient to pull her into my heart.
- [Taking on the Nuclear Goliath](http://commonwonders.com/taking-on-the-nuclear-goliath/) - “Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And . . . as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it. “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
- [Law, Order and Social Suicide](http://commonwonders.com/law-order-and-social-suicide/) - Want a ringside seat for the war on crime? Go to killedbypolice.net. A few hours ago (as I write this), the site had listed 1,191 police killings in the U.S. this year. I just looked again. The total is up one.
- [Love South of Heaven](http://commonwonders.com/love-south-of-heaven/) - Write about love, as in love thy enemy, and the social recoil sounds like this: “There is no nexus at which we can speak with ISIS. Singing Kumbaya while being led to a beheading can’t work.”
- [Adding Up the Broken Souls](http://commonwonders.com/adding-up-the-broken-souls/) - “The question now is how to change our institutions so that they promote human values rather than destroy them.” Philip Zimbardo, who posed this question in the wake of the famous — or infamous — Stanford Prison Experiment 44 years ago, might have added: If we fail to do so, we guarantee our own social collapse.
- [Beyond Trump: The Politics of Courage](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-trump-the-politics-of-courage/) - If Donald Trump can thrive politically by throwing meat to the American id, what else is possible? How about the opposite? Trump’s most recent attempt to reclaim poll supremacy — his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our representatives can figure out what’s going on” — is not simply reckless and dangerous, but also starkly clarifying. America’s bully billionaire, so rich he doesn’t have to heed the niceties of political correctness, is channeling old-time American racism, as mean and ugly and self-righteous as it’s ever been. Jim Crow is still with us. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” is still with us.
- [The Dynamics of Compassion](http://commonwonders.com/the-dynamics-of-compassion/) - It’s too easy to reduce acts of kindness to an “aw, isn’t that nice?” sort of irrelevance. What if we thought about them, instead, as templates for foreign policy? For one thing, if we did, there would be no such thing as “foreign” policy — no segregation of most of humanity behind borders and labels, to be controlled and, most of all, feared. There would only be getting-to-know-you policy, not in a simplistic sense but with a deep and courageous curiosity . . . because our survival depends on it.
- [Claiming Power, Creating the Future](http://commonwonders.com/claiming-power-creating-the-future/) - “Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution . . .” Ralph Nader writes in a recent essay that we should demand acknowledgement of this fact from our presidential candidates and ask what they will do to restore this sovereignty to the American people, in their various manifestations as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers.
- [The Aftermath of Paris](http://commonwonders.com/the-aftermath-of-paris/) - I’m sitting in the aftermath of Paris, feeling emotions tear me apart. One of the emotions is joy. My daughter, who lives there, is safe. Has “joy” ever felt so troubling?
- [Yellow Ribbons and Endless War](http://commonwonders.com/yellow-ribbons-and-endless-war/) - “By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” This was Bush 41, a quarter of a century ago, celebrating the terrific poll numbers his kwik-win war on Iraq was generating. Remember yellow ribbons? I think he had a point. “Vietnam syndrome” — the public aversion to war — still has a shadow presence in America, but it no longer matters.
- [Spiritually Rudderless](http://commonwonders.com/spiritually-rudderless/) - Another deep cry, followed by a shrug. The world is at war, at war, at war. But it only hurts them, the helpless ones, the anonymous poor, who absorb the bombs and bullets, who bury their children, who flee their broken countries. Sixty million people have been displaced by the current wars, the highest number of uprooted since World War II. But who cares?
- [Disturbing Schools](http://commonwonders.com/disturbing-schools/) - So South Carolina has a special crime category called “disturbing schools,” which seems to be creating just that: disturbing schools. Very disturbing schools. Not that I need to single out South Carolina. In my brief stint teaching writing as an outside consultant in several Chicago high schools, some 20 years ago, I was smacked broadside with the observation that the city’s educational system exhibited the behavior of an occupying army, at least in its low-income neighborhoods. Education was something imposed from above and force-fed to the students like bad-tasting medicine. It didn’t honor the students’ own culture.
- [Challenging the Washington Consensus](http://commonwonders.com/challenging-the-washington-consensus/) - Political wisdom always has a sharp, cynical edge. You can’t utter it without feeling the throb of ancient wounds. For instance: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
- [An International Conscience](http://commonwonders.com/an-international-conscience/) - “The Pentagon said on Saturday that it would make ‘condolence payments’ to the survivors of the American airstrike earlier this month on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, as well as to the next of kin of those who died in the attack.” Such a small piece of news, reported a few days ago by the New York Times. I’m not sure if anything could make me feel more ashamed of being an American.
- [Why Bombing a Hospital Is a War Crime](http://commonwonders.com/why-bombing-a-hospital-is-a-war-crime/) - “We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds.” So said Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse at the hospital the U.S. bombed in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 people: doctors, staff, patients (including three children). This image is now spiraling through the Internet and across the global consciousness.
- [The Moral Rabbit Hole](http://commonwonders.com/the-moral-rabbit-hole/) - By Robert C. Koehler And down the moral rabbit hole we go. The New York Times reported last week that U.S. soldiers still fighting the war in Afghanistan — 14 years on — are under orders to be “culturally sensitive” regarding different attitudes among our Afghan allies about, uh . . . the sexual abuse
- [Learning How To Dance](http://commonwonders.com/learning-how-to-dance/) - “Native Americans have to concede that rain dances don’t work.” Yeah, snort. How funny can you get? It’s the New Rules segment of “Real Time with Bill Maher” and the host has just tossed his gag tomahawk at the First People. A picture fills the screen: Indians in full regalia, dancing. The caption below it says “Tribal Thumpers.” He pauses, straight-faced, eyeballs rolling in sarcasm. There’s a trickle of laughter amid the awkward silence, then Maher turns away from the camera, presumably toward the crew back stage, and calls out in his fake shame-on-me voice, “Are you making fun of Indians, Bill?”
- [The Squirming Buddha](http://commonwonders.com/2199-2/) - The world hemorrhages. Refugees flow from its wounds. Is there a way to be innocent of this? People are washed ashore. They die of suffocation in humanity-stuffed trucks. They flee war and politics; they flee starvation. And finally, we don’t even have sufficient air for them to breathe.
- [Humanity Washed Ashore](http://commonwonders.com/humanity-washed-ashore/) - Who are all these people? Here’s another global problem — this flow of refugees — that national governments are apparently incapable of dealing with in a long-term, cooperative, globally responsible way. As with climate change, as with war and disarmament, they retreat into insularity in the face of such matters and become protective of their short-term, individual “interests,” which mostly concern the bureaucratic sacredness of their borders and an obsessive distinction between us and them.
- [Climbing Denali](http://commonwonders.com/climbing-denali/) - Renaming a mountain is better than beheading it. And the pseudo-uproar from Donald Trump and other Republicans over the presidential renaming of the continent’s highest mountain, Denali — “the great one” — is so much yammering in a cage.
- [Rewriting the Human Story](http://commonwonders.com/rewriting-the-human-story/) - Oh sacred planet. The terror of climate crisis is a long time in the making. As I read about the mass mobilization forming around the upcoming U.N. climate change convention, which is likely to accomplish far too little — because what’s needed is change at the roots of civilization — I feel a desperate impatience, a tearing at my soul. What can I do that’s bigger than anger, bigger than a demand for governmental and corporate entities to make changes they are essentially incapable of making?
- [The Donald's 'Inclusive' Racism](http://commonwonders.com/the-donalds-inclusive-racism/) - The central assumption of democracy — beyond the assumption of fair elections, which is disturbingly questionable — is that voters are the possessors of their own “interests,” and vote for the candidate most sympathetic to them. But of course those interests are fair game for advertising, bombast and propaganda — and the psychology of fear.
- [A Wedge for Nuclear Disarmament](http://commonwonders.com/a-wedge-for-nuclear-disarmament/) - “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith . . .” What if words like this actually meant something? This is Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which the United States signed in 1970. It continues: “. . . on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
- [Nuclear Disarmament: If Not Now, When?](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-disarmament-if-not-now-when/) - Oh plaintive cry for justice, for change, for the world we must create, welling up from a tiny island nation in the Pacific Ocean. I can only pray: Let there be an authority large enough to hear it. My first reaction, upon learning that the Republic of the Marshall Islands — former U.S. territory, still ravaged and radioactive, the site of 67 H-bomb tests between 1946 and 1958 — has filed lawsuits against the nine nations that possess nuclear weapons demanding that they eliminate their arsenals, as per the provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was cringing disbelief. Are they serious? I couldn’t imagine an action more futile.
- [Taking Down the Flag](http://commonwonders.com/taking-down-the-flag/) - The flag in front of Home Depot was at half-mast and I felt myself wondering why in an awkward, despairing way. The nation and the news cycle were still thrashing in the wake of the Chattanooga killings and I figured, oh, it’s for the soldiers — but all that realization did was intensity the troubled feelings the spectacle had aroused. This is America, where you can shop and mourn . . . but it wasn’t just that.
- [Armed Insecurity](http://commonwonders.com/armed-insecurity/) - “. . . no real security, just powers of retaliation.” This was Norman Mailer, four-plus decades ago, writing in Miami and the Siege of Chicago about the obsessive security measures – “helicopters riding overhead like roller coasters, state troopers with magnums on their hip and crash helmets, squad cars, motorcycles” – at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, which . . . uh, didn’t actually provide security, but sure allowed us to get even afterwards.
- [Soulless Economics](http://commonwonders.com/soulless-economics/) - Austerity, the tool of neoliberal capitalism, stands up to Greek democracy and stares it down. Oh well. We’re remarkably comfortable with soulless economics. Pope Francis, speaking this week in Paraguay, cried to the nations of Planet Earth: “I ask them not to yield to an economic model . . . which needs to sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.”
- [The Collateral Damage of Austerity](http://commonwonders.com/the-collateral-damage-of-austerity/) - “Officials in France and in Brussels said on Monday that they were unhappy and dumbfounded with the no vote, but let it be known that they would hold the door open to the possibility of a compromise between Greece and its creditors.” Dumbfounded? Why? Because the godlike power of the creditors was insulted?
- [Absolute Power](http://commonwonders.com/absolute-power/) - “The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images be turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.” This was the Washington Post a few days ago, informing us wearily that the torture thing isn’t dead yet. The bureaucracy convulses, the wheels of justice grind. So much moral relativism to evaluate.
- [His Soul Wrapped in a Confederate Flag](http://commonwonders.com/his-soul-wrapped-in-a-confederate-flag/) - At the bond hearing, grieving loved ones forgave Dylann Roof. This was reported as news, but it was so much more than that. It was the light embracing the darkness. And white America absorbed this forgiveness through the eyes of the 21-year-old terrorist, who watched the proceedings on a video screen from his jail cell. Whatever he heard and felt is unknown, but beyond him, in the world he believed he was saving, something gave. The solidarity of whiteness — the quiet assumption of white supremacy — shuddered ever so slightly.
- [War, Murder and the American Way](http://commonwonders.com/war-murder-and-the-american-way/) - He sat with them for an hour in prayer. Then he pulled his gun out and started shooting. And today our national numbness is wrapped in a Confederate flag. The young man who killed nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night was an old-school racist. “I have to do it,” Dylann Storm Roof is said to have explained. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
- [Letting Go of Race](http://commonwonders.com/letting-go-of-race/) - What’s your race? Most of the discussion around the revelation that Rachel Dolezal, who resigned this week under pressure as head of the Spokane, Wash., NAACP, isn’t black, as she had claimed, and grew up as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl, seems to assume that this question is objective, uncomplicated and neutral. Come on, which is it? You’re either African-American, Caucasian or other. Check the box.
- [Swimming While Black](http://commonwonders.com/swimming-while-black/) - “He came into the call out of control, and as the video shows, was out of control during the incident.” And cellphone videos continue to unravel America’s “law and order” paradigm. You might almost call it the cellphone revolution, as random video clips keep exposing a dark side of our social order that used to be so easy to deny. YouTube has become the gateway to our collective conscience, such as it is.
- [Nuclear Realism](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-realism/) - There’s a category of political intellectuals who proudly proclaim themselves “realists,” then proceed to defend and advance a deeply faith-based agenda that centers on the ongoing necessity to prepare for war, including nuclear war. These intellectuals, as they defend the military-industrial status quo (which often supports them financially), have made themselves the spokespersons for a deep human cancer: a soul cancer. When we prepare for war, we honor a profoundly embedded death wish; indeed, we assume we can exploit it for our own advantage. We can’t, of course. War and hatred link all of us; we can’t dehumanize, then proceed to murder, “the enemy” without doing the same, ultimately, to ourselves.
- [Zero Tolerance](http://commonwonders.com/zero-tolerance/) - By Robert C. Koehler “As I walked down the hall, one of the police officers employed in the school noticed I did not have my identification badge with me.” The speaker is testifying before the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. He was a high school freshman at the time. Ah, school days! “Before
- [A New Dark Age](http://commonwonders.com/a-new-dark-age/) - “What struck me” journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “was the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and militarized gear. “After 30 years of the War on Drugs and a neoliberal restructuring of the state at the local level, which is not a reduction of the public sector but a transformation of the public sector, the only thing local governments had were weapons.”
- [Broken Windows, Broken Spines](http://commonwonders.com/broken-windows-broken-spines/) - The 21st century has skewed off plan and begun to break open. Its self-designated guardians and explainers look on, at times, confused. “But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires — these are statistics. There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
- [Moment of Silence](http://commonwonders.com/moment-of-silence/) - This is big. A new civil rights era births itself in terrible pain. Black men die, over and over. I can only hope that peace is the result, serious peace, bigger than new laws, bigger than better trained police — agape peace, you might say, peace that is, in the words of Martin Luther King, “an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”
- [Idiots of the World, Unite](http://commonwonders.com/idiots-of-the-world-unite/) - “Sir, you are an idiot.” Wow, an insult wrapped in such old-fashioned politeness. I let the words hover and reach, as I always do, for peace: that is to say, for clarity, connection, common humanity.
- [Should the Police Be Armed?](http://commonwonders.com/should-the-police-be-armed/) - The cellphone video “reality footage” just doesn’t stop. Black men are shot, killed, handcuffed. The shortcomings of their prematurely terminated lives soon become public knowledge, vaguely justifying the shocking wrongness of the officer’s action — always poisoning the grief. The family, the loved ones, the sympathetic sector of the American (and global) public demand “justice.” Even when they get it, or sort of get it, in the form of an arrest or some official expression of regret, the victim — the human being they valued — is still dead.
- [The Real Nuclear Threat](http://commonwonders.com/the-real-nuclear-threat/) - If war were only “itself” — the violence and horror, the conflagration and death — it would be bad enough, but it’s also an abstraction, a specific language of self-justifying righteousness that allows proponents to contemplate unleashing it not merely in physical but in moral safety. War, the abstraction, is an instrument of policy, an “option” that can be waged or threatened to get one’s way. It is always contained and sure of itself, limited in its goals and, of course, necessary. Its unintended consequences are minimal and quickly neutralized with an official apology, then forgotten. If we didn’t forget, the next war wouldn’t seem like such a viable, enticing option.
- [Lodestar of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/lodestar-of-peace/) - “Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind . . .” What? Were they serious? I kneel in a sort of gasping awe as I read the words of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty signed in 1928 – by the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and ultimately by every country that then existed. The treaty . . . outlaws war.
- [Wealth vs. Money](http://commonwonders.com/wealth-vs-money/) - By Robert C. Koehler “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” The words are those of Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, speaking to Edward R. Murrow in 1955, as quoted recently in an essay by Paul Buchheit. What was he thinking? Six decades later, the words have such a counter-resonance with
- [Rocka My Soul](http://commonwonders.com/rocka-my-soul/) - “I wanna be ready . . .” And suddenly the glass case shattered. You know the one, perhaps. I’d been agitated by it for the past hour or so, sitting as I was maybe 25 rows back from the stage at Chicago’s ornate Auditorium Theater, watching the Alvin Ailey troupe dance their hearts out, moving their bodies with such lithe precision and grace.
- [Frat Boys on the Bus](http://commonwonders.com/frat-boys-on-the-bus/) - “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me . . .” Yeah, something had to happen. The cellphone video went public and the frat boys on the bus, who were just having a little politically incorrect fun, y’know, singing about Jim Crow exclusionary practices and, well, lynching, suddenly found themselves thrust into a national context, embarrassing the hell out of their fraternity and their school.
- [White Terrorism](http://commonwonders.com/white-terrorism/) - The president doesn’t “love” America? Would that it were true. Would that Rudy Giuliani’s five-star Republican nightmare actually paced the Oval Office, pondering how to disarm, demilitarize . . . defang American exceptionalism.
- [Peace Behind Barbed Wire](http://commonwonders.com/peace-behind-barbed-wire/) - As media ownership converges and technology “unites” us, the concept of national identity grows ever easier to exploit — and therefore, I fear, increasingly, and dangerously, simplistic. This is the war on terror. This is the war on crime. They march on, despite the magnitude of their failures. They march on . . . because America is tough. America is exceptional.
- [Alive and Bleeding](http://commonwonders.com/alive-and-bleeding/) - Good and evil leap from the headlines: “Egyptian planes pound ISIS in Libya in revenge for mass beheadings of Christians.” It’s nonstop action for the American public. It’s the history of war compressed into a dozen words. It’s Fox News, but it could be just about any mainstream purveyor of current events.
- [The Sociology of Dead Children](http://commonwonders.com/the-sociology-of-dead-children/) - Experts have put urban violence under the microscope. You might call it the sociology of dead kids. There’s a lot less here than meets the eye, or so it seemed when I read about a new study by researchers at Yale called “Tragic, but not random: The social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries.” It’s an attempt to create categories of likely future shooting victims in Chicago and, thus, determine who among us is most in danger. Well, sure, why not? But in the process, the study, at least as it was reported a few days ago in the Chicago Sun-Times, utterly depersonalized the potential victims, along with the communities in which they lived, reducing them to components in a mathematical formula.
- [War and Perpetual Adolescence](http://commonwonders.com/war-and-perpetual-adolescence/) - The urgency I feel isn’t any longer to stop a particular war but to interrupt endless war: to interrupt the narrowly focused geopolitical conversation, conveyed to us over and over by media stenographers, in which lethal intervention — wherever — is always the first and only choice. The uncertainty is never a matter of “if.” It’s only a matter of “when.” For instance: “The West needs to bolster deterrence in Ukraine by raising the risks and costs to Russia of any renewed major offensive. That requires providing direct military assistance — in far larger amounts than provided to date and including lethal defensive arms.”
- [War in Two Directions](http://commonwonders.com/war-in-two-directions/) - “Sometimes they have drug and alcohol problems and when they feel that the VA is ignoring them, not answering the phone, failing to return calls for assistance or there are long wait times, they get more and more disgruntled. The VA is ripe for a mass killing but no one is listening to us.” The speaker is John Glidewell, former chief of police at the Cheyenne, Wyo., VA medical center, who was quoted in a Washington Post story a few days ago. As I read his words, I realized they sounded a far deeper note of desperation than the story was addressing, even though, my God, the events being reported on were the fodder of scandal.
- [Partners in Terror](http://commonwonders.com/partners-in-terror/) - By Robert C. Koehler “Je suis Charlie. Tout est pardonné.” Muhammad in tears adorns the new cover of Charlie Hebdo: “I am Charlie. All is forgiven.” This is bigger than satire. I take a deep breath, uncertain how to write about last week’s insane shooting spree in Paris. My daughter and her husband live there.
- [Turning Our Backs](http://commonwonders.com/turning-our-backs/) - Oh, the moral force of a snub. Several hundred cops turn their backs on New York’s mayor as he eulogizes one of their own, killed in the line of duty, and the media have another us-vs.-them story to report. Bill de Blasio’s in trouble, accused of playing politics with the lives of heroes. And, of course, the story goes no deeper than the dramatic accusation.
- [Skulking Away from a Failed War](http://commonwonders.com/skulking-away-from-a-failed-war/) - “The only good Talib is a dead Talib.” These words, uttered half a decade ago by the head of intelligence for the NATO coalition force in Afghanistan, summon a far earlier American savagery. As the American empire affects to close the door on its war with Afghanistan, the words also serve as a sort of doorstop propping open our further intervention in this broken country.
- [Refusing To Wage War](http://commonwonders.com/refusing-to-wage-war/) - And so we grieve over another national tragedy. Two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were shot — assassinated — as they sat in their patrol car this past weekend. Let the needlessness of their deaths rip our hearts open. Let the humanity come first.
- [Abolishing the CIA](http://commonwonders.com/abolishing-the-cia/) - By Robert C. Koehler The shock resonating from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report isn’t due so much to the revelations themselves, grotesque as the details are, but to the fact that they’re now officially public. National spokespersons (except for Dick Cheney) can no longer deny, quite so glibly, that the United States is
- [Beyond M.A.D.: Reviving Nuclear War](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-m-a-d-reviving-nuclear-war/) - “Some of the key technocrats and scientists of the Cold War say the nation has become overly confident about its nuclear deterrence. The nuclear enterprise, they say, ‘is rusting its way to disarmament.’” Let’s meditate on this irony — that disarmament, finally, means no more than growing old and weak and pathetic.
- [Racism: It's the Law](http://commonwonders.com/racism-its-the-law/) - Smoke and fire, sirens blaring, horns honking, a sudden hail of bullets. This is what passes for the American dialogue on race and justice. It’s hidden until it explodes.
- [Peace as a Human Right](http://commonwonders.com/peace-as-a-human-right/) - “Individuals and peoples have a right to peace.” In the beginning was the word. OK. This is the beginning, and these are the words, but they haven’t arrived yet — at least not officially, with full force of meaning
- [Democracy's Most Cherished Act](http://commonwonders.com/2054-2/) - Democracy! A word, a way of life, our highest ideal: Everyone is equal; no one is marginal. I still feel the force of this word, though the middle syllable — “mock” — grows increasingly dominant when I hear it, especially now, as election season rolls around again. The enormity of my indifference to this election is balanced by something that feels like grief. The system we live under is . . .
- [One My Lai a Month](http://commonwonders.com/one-my-lai-a-month/) - “When somebody asks, ‘Why do you do it to a gook, why do you do this to people?’ your answer is, ‘So what, they’re just gooks, they’re not people. It doesn’t make any difference what you do to them; they’re not human.’ “And this thing is built into you,” Cpl. John Geymann testified almost 44 years ago at the Winter Soldier Investigation, held in Detroit, which was sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “It’s thrust into your head from the moment you wake up in boot camp to the moment you wake up when you’re a civilian.”
- [Our Souls Turned into Weapons](http://commonwonders.com/our-souls-turned-into-weapons/) - “During basic training, we are weaponized: our souls turned into weapons.” Jacob George’s suicide last month — a few days after President Obama announced that the US was launching its war against ISIS — opens a deep, terrible hole in the national identity. George: singer, banjo player, poet, peace warrior, vet. He served three tours in Afghanistan. He brought the war home. He tried to repair the damage.
- [Sweden and the Wakening of Eco-Integrity](http://commonwonders.com/sweden-and-the-wakening-of-eco-integrity/) - Startling news: Sweden now recycles 99 percent of its waste. At least that’s what people are saying, including an official website of Sweden itself: “Less than one per cent of Sweden’s household waste ends up in a rubbish dump.” There may be less to this statement than meets the eye, but before I address that issue, I need to pause at the jolt of ecstatic excitement and jubilant incredulity I felt for a moment — that maybe the resource-consuming, planet-destroying, multinational political and economic system I’m part of is capable of correcting its own insanity, committing itself to a sustainable future and embracing the circle of life.
- [The Cancer of Violent Extremism](http://commonwonders.com/the-cancer-of-violent-extremism/) - “As we look to the future, one issue risks a cycle of conflict that could derail so much progress. And that is the cancer of violent extremism that has ravaged so many parts of the Muslim world.” The cancer of violent extremism . . .
- [Traces of Evil](http://commonwonders.com/traces-of-evil/) - Barack Obama’s central dilemma last week, when he tried to sell a new war to the American public on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, was to speak convincingly about the wisdom and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy over the last decade-plus while at the same time, alas, dropping the bad news that it didn’t work. Thus: “Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.”
- [Fast-Draw Morality](http://commonwonders.com/fast-draw-morality/) - “So you want to disarm cops LOL yeah that’s an intelligent thing to do the gang bangers would love that surely they will unilaterally disarm too.” I’m used to semi-anonymous sarcasm by now, like this Huffington Post comment beneath a recent column I wrote on the militarization of the police and the possibility of disarmament, and I have no interest in “fighting it out” with the guy. But there it is, perfectly preserved: an impulse homage to Big Fear, wrapped in unexamined certainty. This is fast-draw morality, made in Hollywood.
- [A Future That Values Everyone](http://commonwonders.com/a-future-that-values-everyone/) - “I think if we had a gun we would have been shot immediately.” This is as good a place to start as any, at the logical limits of violent self-defense. The speaker is Andres Gutierrez of Nonviolent Peaceforce, a nonprofit organization that has engaged in peacekeeping work in troubled regions of the world for the last decade. Gutierrez, the organization’s team leader in South Sudan, along with colleague Derek Oakley, got caught in the chaos last April when the city of Bor was attacked, with armed men overrunning the perimeter of a U.N. base where thousands of civilians had sought protection. The two took shelter inside a mud hut.
- [The Courage To Disarm](http://commonwonders.com/the-courage-to-disarm/) - The Ferguson tragedy, like all those that preceded it and all that will follow — involving the trivial and panicky use of lethal force, by the police or anyone else — stirs up questions the social status quo doesn’t dare face. My sister, Sue Melcher, put it this way: “I find myself also nauseated that another issue never seems to enter the discussion: the issue that a highly trained officer could make such a mistake with a gun demonstrates that just having the weapon present increased the danger of the situation. Had the citizens been armed, how many more casualties could there have been? None of us is ‘healthy’ enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely — and is that even possible?”
- [Iraq and Endless War](http://commonwonders.com/iraq-and-endless-war/) - Our kills are clean and secular; theirs are messy and religious. “In their effort to create a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria,” CNN tells us, “ISIS fighters have slaughtered civilians as they take over cities in both countries. “In Syria, the group put some of its victims’ severed heads on poles.”
- [Hatred in the Nuclear Era](http://commonwonders.com/hatred-in-the-nuclear-era/) - Before nuclear weapons, after nuclear weapons . . . “The latter era, of course,” writes Noam Chomsky, “opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts.”
- [The Water of Life](http://commonwonders.com/the-water-of-life/) - I’m thirsty. Indeed, I’m overwhelmed by thirst, thinking about those who lack access to clean water. I’m thirsty for a different world. “In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lack water, including those living in hospitals and refugee camps,” Sarah Kendzior wrote in Al-Jazeera last week. “On July 15, citizens of Detroit held a rally in solidarity, holding signs that said ‘Water for all, from Detroit to Palestine.’ A basic resource has become a distant dream, a longing for a transformation of politics aimed at ending suffering instead of extending it.”
- [Never Again to Us](http://commonwonders.com/never-again-to-us/) - “Israel regrets every injury to civilians. I call on the residents of Gaza: Don’t stay there. Hamas wants you to die, we want you to be safe.” This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as quoted in the Jewish Daily Forward, cleansing the nation’s collective conscience. Is it really that easy to sweep away the moral sting of violent action? A captive population is being pummeled with missiles. Well over 500 Palestinians have died so far in Operation Protective Edge, three-quarters of them civilians and, of course, many of them children. But “we want you to be safe” and wish we didn’t have to do this.
- [The Oxymoron of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/the-oxymoron-of-peace/) - “At the same time, values and ideas which were considered universal, such as cooperation, mutual aid, international social justice and peace as an encompassing paradigm are also becoming irrelevant.” Maybe this piercing observation by Roberto Savio, founder of the news agency Inter Press Service, is the cruelest cut of all. Geopolitically speaking, hope — the official kind, represented, say, by the United Nations in 1945 — feels fainter than I can remember. “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . .”
- [Democracy: No Longer for Sale?](http://commonwonders.com/democracy-no-longer-for-sale/) - Ah, 1961. The year — certain aspects of it, anyway — are almost impossible to remember. “Whites only” bathrooms, for instance. U.S. Rep. John Lewis, legendary civil rights leader and crosser of lines, recently tweeted an ancient mugshot memorializing his arrest that year for using a “whites only” bathroom in Mississippi and, in the process, amping up outrage against Jim Crow segregation in the South and intensifying the civil rights movement’s global resonance.
- [Watching the World Destroy Itself](http://commonwonders.com/watching-the-world-destroy-itself/) - The video opens with a few bars of adrenalin-pumping music. We see a topsy-turvy camera angle, sky, trees, darkness, then a staccato pop pop pop that blends rhythmically with the music, but of course it’s gunfire, lots of gunfire, followed by a few urgent words in Arabic, then English. “Down here! Down here!” This chaotic excitement is Iraq, the evening’s International Hot Spot, brought to us by ABC. It’s the news, but it’s also reality TV and big league sports, rolled into an entertainment package of shocking cluelessness. OMG, ISIS is on the move. It’s winning. Stay tuned!
- [Soul Murder](http://commonwonders.com/soul-murder/) - All men are created equal. All chattel are insured. I saw the movie Belle the other day and a piece of it got stuck in my head. The costume drama, set in England in the 1780s, hinged on a real historical event: the monstrous voyage of the slave ship Zong in 1781, from West Africa to the Caribbean. Its cargo when it set out on its transatlantic voyage included some 470 tightly packed human beings — too tightly packed, it turns out. Disease ran through the cargo hold. Slaves and crewmen began to die. The ship got lost. They began running low on water. Eventually the surviving crew jettisoned . . . 132 live humans, still in chains. This was business as usual.
- [Criminal Wrongdoing and the CIA](http://commonwonders.com/criminal-wrongdoing-and-the-cia/) - Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon. So the Obama administration, in its attempt to hammer another national security leaker, is directly challenging the right of journalists to protect confidential sources. Administration lawyers, arguing this week before the Supreme Court — which rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s appeal of a Circuit Court decision that could require him to testify in the case against a former CIA officer — asserted, according to the Times, that “reporters have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing by confidential sources.”
- [Army of One](http://commonwonders.com/army-of-one/) - The world withheld love and he went to war. He was an army of one — another army of one, laying out his plans in secret torment, plotting his “day of retribution.” “The rampage shooters see themselves as moralistic punishers striking against deep injustice,” Peter Turchin wrote a year and a half ago, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. In his essay, ominously titled “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” which was published at Social Evolution Forum, he notes the upward trajectory of mass murders. Since the ’60s, they’ve increased more than tenfold. Something’s going wrong in the world we’ve created.
- [The Social Immune System](http://commonwonders.com/the-social-immune-system/) - Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy. Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it’s the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals. Or . . . “Today, Nazi influences are growing in Europe for the same reasons they did back then. The social safety nets have been torn, and people are left behind. Left alone. The hopelessness is what comes first, then the hatred. It’s never the other way around.”
- [Money and Morality](http://commonwonders.com/money-and-morality/) - Step on the gas, step on a man . . . Writing recently in The Nation, Chris Hayes drew an intensely unnerving parallel between the use of fossil fuels as an energy source and the use of slave labor — not a moral parallel, but a financial one, though money and morality have a perversely symbiotic relationship. Where there’s money to be made — especially enormous quantities of it — moral justifications come awfully cheap.
- [The War To End All Wars](http://commonwonders.com/the-war-to-end-all-wars/) - “Peace, as we have seen, is not an order natural to mankind: it is artificial, intricate and highly volatile. All kinds of preconditions are necessary.” — Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines.
- [Working the Dark Side](http://commonwonders.com/working-the-dark-side/) - Ten years ago, photos of the crucifixion — and worse — were released to the American public. The media still call it “the Abu Ghraib scandal,” as though, oops, the awkward repercussions for Team Bush were the torture photos’ primary horror. No one talks about “the Auschwitz scandal.” The depth of our moral wrong has yet to be plumbed.
- [Losing Another Decade](http://commonwonders.com/losing-another-decade/) - “We cannot afford to lose another decade.” My God. There’s more darkness in this quote than the New York Times intended. I winced when I read these words of Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the committee that wrote the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC report, which the Times quoted in a recent editorial headlined “Time Is Running Out.”
- [In Partnership with Mother Earth](http://commonwonders.com/in-partnership-with-mother-earth/) - OK, mankind, it’s time to grow up, and I see a good way to start: Change the wording of Genesis 1:26. Change one word. Last week, I quoted that Bible verse in a column about the increasing velocity of climate change: “And God said . . . let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,” etc. Dominion! Nature belongs to us, to suck dry and toss away. And thus we moved out of the circle of life and became its conquerors, an attitude at the core of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of civilization. The momentum of this attitude is still driving us. We don’t know how to stop, even though most people now grasp that we’re wrecking the environmental commons that sustains life.
- [Calling All Pagans](http://commonwonders.com/calling-all-pagans/) - Somewhere between these two quotes lies the future: “And I would like to emphasize that nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.” “The Judeo-Christian worldview is that man is at the center of the universe; nature was therefore created for man. Nature has no intrinsic worth other than man’s appreciation and moral use of it.”
- [High Stakes](http://commonwonders.com/high-stakes/) - A mind is a terrible thing to test, especially a child’s mind — if, in so doing, you reduce it to a number and proceed to worship that number, ignoring the extraordinary complexity and near-infinite potential of what you have just tested. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” What if?
- [Monsters in Our Midst](http://commonwonders.com/monsters-in-our-midst/) - “It was loaded with meaning and death.” Oh lethal, ticklish topic. So many people love guns and swear by them — many of them people with whom I am otherwise in essential political agreement. And it’s not like I relish a debate about “gun control,” a tug-of-war about limits that offends most gun lovers and causes weapon-buying sprees after every mass murder.
- [Make It Hurt](http://commonwonders.com/make-it-hurt/) - “After Russia invaded Crimea, a senior American official vowed to ‘make it hurt.’ More than two weeks later, Moscow has given no sign that it feels any pain, and the challenge for President Obama is whether he is willing or able to inflict enough to change the Kremlin’s calculus.” This is the New York Times, of course, yet again parroting the insecure right, ignoring history and reducing the terrifying complexity of international politics – and the great global longing for peace – to a lethally simplistic game of winning and losing. It’s the kind of coverage we get in every political crisis, inevitably shutting down whatever collective intelligence we’re capable of manifesting and reducing the public to spectators at a geopolitical wrestling match.
- [Poster City of Abandonment](http://commonwonders.com/poster-city-of-abandonment/) - White flight, corporate flight . . . I grew up just outside Detroit and have felt an ache in my heart for this bleeding city for so many years now. It’s long been one of the country’s designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was “urban blight,” a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.
- [Outing the Deep State](http://commonwonders.com/outing-the-deep-state/) - There has always been a “deep state,” as Mike Lofgren described it in a compelling essay recently published at BillMoyers.com — a predatory consensus of money and political ideology that serves only its own endless growth and functions in pristine autonomy from any sort of democratic process — but defining it begs an enormous question: Can we actually build a world that isn’t run by its shadow interests? And what is this going to take? Can good will and big principles stand up to Wall Street and the Washington consensus? Perhaps even more to the point, if it’s even possible, how much time do we have before war and climate change rip the human experiment to shreds?
- [Voices of Pain and Peace](http://commonwonders.com/voices-of-pain-and-peace/) - No matter how bad it gets, we can look inside ourselves and find hope, possibility . . . the future. And when we find that, we know what it means to build peace. “It’s like I’m in a never-ending battle with my brain,” Kayla said. “They called me Crazy Kayla. I have anger problems. Someone messes with me, I lose it. I was molested, raped, physically and mentally abused. I was in 127 different homes. I have a 3-month-old baby . . .”
- [Walk Softly](http://commonwonders.com/walk-softly/) - “When you go to dig your fields, or make a pot from clay, you are disturbing the balance of things. When you walk, you are moving the air, breathing it in and out. Therefore you must make payments.” Oh, unraveling planet, exploited, polluted, overrun with berserk human technology. How does one face it with anything other than rage and despair, which quickly harden into cynicism? And cynicism is just another word for helplessness.
- [Asphyxiating Education](http://commonwonders.com/asphyxiating-education/) - “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” This is how we talk about learning, growth and the human future? Things are getting worse in the American classroom, not better. The experts and the special interests purporting to fix the educational system are continuing, instead, to asphyxiate it.
- [A Bug on the Windshield](http://commonwonders.com/a-bug-on-the-windshield/) - The young guys were half a block ahead of us. Nothing was happening except that they were walking. A police car pulled up behind them, slowed to their pace, aimed a spotlight at them. They were African-American (did you guess?), numbering maybe half a dozen. They weren’t intimidated. Some of them stopped, stood staring at the police car, talking to it; this had obviously happened before. The spotlight continued to shine in their faces. Other young men crossed the street in front of the car and joined the crowd. The game went on for a while: the slow saunter, the cops driving along next to them, the light in their faces.
- [Abolishing War, Resurrecting Fallujah](http://commonwonders.com/abolishing-war-resurrecting-fallujah/) - Iraq vet Ross Caputi’s film opens with a fleeting synopsis of the American heartbreak — and the bandage we tape across it. His documentary, Fear Not the Path of Truth, is about the U.S. devastation of Fallujah, in which he participated as part of Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004, but the first couple minutes give us an overview of his hometown, the “former industrial city” of Fitchburg, Mass.:
- [Cosmetic Surgery](http://commonwonders.com/cosmetic-surgery/) - “In Iraq, al-Qaeda launched an offensive to take control of two cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, that U.S. troops sacrificed heavily to clear of terrorists between 2004 and 2008.” And so the new year begins, with a heavy dose of same old, same old. This is the Washington Post editorial page, which Robert Parry dubbed the neocon bullhorn, blaming the al-Qaeda uprising in western Iraq on President Obama’s withdrawal of troops from that country, along with his failure to invade Syria last fall, all of which, the editorial charges, adds up to complacency in the face of growing danger and a lack of protection for “vital U.S. interests.”
- [The Code of Shame](http://commonwonders.com/the-code-of-shame/) - “I’m dying to know what it’s like to love somebody — to know what it feels like to be wanted.” — Art Corneau So we need a documentary to break the Code of Shame. It’s called A Hard Name and came out in 2009; it ran on Canadian public television. (The film is online but, unfortunately, can’t be viewed in the U.S. “due to rights restrictions.”) Director Alan Zweig found seven ex-prisoners — five men, two women — and just let them speak. The result was the opening of a raw wound: the public exposure of something so deeply hidden, so wrapped in cynical taboo, I could barely listen without screaming: Why?
- [Nuclear Disarmament: Beyond Iran](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-disarmament-beyond-iran/) - Iran! So long our enemy-in-waiting, just asking for it, y’know? No wonder Americans are confused about the idea of maybe not going to war with that country one of these days, at least according to USA Today, which reported: “The White House and Iran face an uphill selling job to convince Americans to embrace the interim nuclear pact negotiated with Tehran last month.”
- [Return of the Golden Calf](http://commonwonders.com/return-of-the-golden-calf/) - ’Tis the season to feel rage and heartache about the economy. I feel hope as well, praise the Lord, thanks to Pope Francis and the alley behind my house, where nothing of value goes to waste. I’m the kind of person who can’t throw anything away, but sometimes I have to anyway — an old microwave, a sewing machine that hasn’t been used in 20 years, a threadbare easy chair, tangled computer wires and other excruciating miscellany — and when I do, it’s usually gone within a day, if not an hour. When I can no longer find value in what I possess, others see it as a gift from the universe.
- [Trivializing Peace](http://commonwonders.com/trivializing-peace/) - What goes around comes around . . . and around, and around. Last month, the day after I left Santa Rosa, Calif., a 13-year-old boy carrying a toy replica of an AK-47 was shot and killed on the outskirts of that town by a Sonoma County deputy sheriff with a reputation for being trigger-happy. The officer had ordered the boy to drop the “gun,” then in a matter of two or three seconds opened fire, giving him no chance to comply.
- [Cries in the Wilderness](http://commonwonders.com/cries-in-the-wilderness/) - “The only premise of the book was to just go out and listen.” And the book, edited by Miles Harvey, who is quoted above, is remarkable. It’s one of a kind, as far as I know – How Long Will I Cry? – the first publication of a newly formed nonprofit organization called Big Shoulders Books, which is affiliated with Chicago’s DePaul University. It’s available free of charge, because . . . how could a cry in the wilderness be otherwise?
- [Corralling the Loners](http://commonwonders.com/corralling-the-loners/) - Another crazed, furious loner shocks the world. This time I’m a little too close to the edge of the chaos. I gape at the TV in disbelief: I’m supposed to fly out of Los Angeles Airport — Terminal 3, no less — that afternoon, but all I see is footage of scrambling police and snarled traffic. If I’d booked an earlier flight, I could have been sitting there when the 23-year-old gunman shot the TSA agent at the foot of the escalator, then wandered through the gate area with his rifle and his grievances.
- [Slicing the Baby in Two](http://commonwonders.com/slicing-the-baby-in-two/) - “To all of our atheist friends: Thank God you’re wrong.” Move over, We Buy Ugly Houses.com and Jackass Presents Bad Grandpa. Here was religious faith on a billboard, refuting non-belief in letters three feet high. I was visiting Los Angeles, driving with a friend along La Cienega Boulevard, when this king-size ad for religious certainty smacked us in the eye.
- [Making Peace with War](http://commonwonders.com/making-peace-with-war/) - What if we had politicians who believed in the abolition of war with as much passion as the Republican right believes in the abolition of taxes? For me, the question that immediately follows is: What kind of politics draws power from resources other than the deep pockets of billionaires? Just because the world is sick of war, how will that ever translate into serious political action to defund standing armies and ongoing weapons research? How will it ever cohere into a consensus that has political traction? Does Washington, D.C. only have room for one consensus?
- [A Rationality Shutdown](http://commonwonders.com/a-rationality-shutdown/) - In an agony of stupidity, the government shuts down. Only some of it shuts down, of course. The part that stays open is the part that’s at war. “Those of you in uniform will remain on your normal duty status,” the president said. “The threats to our national security have not changed, and we need you to be ready for any contingency. Ongoing military operations, like our efforts in Afghanistan, will continue.”
- [Poison Values](http://commonwonders.com/poison-values/) - Poison gas is not only a “moral obscenity” — one the United States stockpiled for decades after its use was banned in warfare — but a metaphor for human recklessness and wasted science. Like it or not, we’re forced to think about it these days, since it’s still an enticing pretext for war. And the more I think about it, the more I marvel at the persistent insanity of its existence. The “red line” that the so-called civilized world crossed over a century ago was not in the use of poison gas but in its creation, because it’s lethal whether it’s used or not. Attempting to get rid of it — by burying it, burning it, dumping it — has consequences almost as deadly as firing it off in battle.
- [Building Real Peace](http://commonwonders.com/building-real-peace/) - “Imagine if we sent 5,000 well-trained nonviolent peacekeepers from throughout the world to protect civilians and work with local civil society in building the peace.” Indeed, imagine if we knew that doing this was an option.
- [Cherry-Picking Evil](http://commonwonders.com/cherry-picking-evil/) - “Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them.” Why does the president need to address a classroom full of third-graders?
- [Stopping a War Before It Starts](http://commonwonders.com/stopping-a-war-before-it-starts/) - This is the time, as the next war strains to be born, amid the same old lies as last time, amid the same urgency and pseudo-debate and pretensions of seriousness: The government of Syria has crossed a “red line.” It has used poison gas, killing hundreds of innocent people and committing a heinous war crime. And suddenly, clear as a bell, we have good vs. evil. Our only course of action, President Obama and his spokespersons tell us, is to “carry out a punitive strike against the Syrian government.”
- [Reflections on a High School Reunion](http://commonwonders.com/reflections-on-a-high-school-reunion/) - It’s hard to lie about your age once you’ve told someone you’ve just been to your 50th high school reunion. Well, technically, it was the 49th – this was the class of ’64. The organizers made the decision to hold it a year early because, uh, more of us would be alive (if I understand the reasoning correctly). In any case, close enough. I went. This is the first class reunion I’d been to in all this time and I hadn’t seen most of the attendees since we seized our diplomas and scattered off in search of our lives.
- [Stop and Frisk](http://commonwonders.com/stop-and-frisk/) - Stopping crime before it happens is a great idea, but stopping young men for “walking while black” — touted by true believers as the same thing — is a game played by an occupying army. The tactic is called stop-and-frisk. As practiced by many police departments, including New York’s, it amounts to blatant racial profiling. Stop-and-frisk makes it impossible for young men of color to lead normal lives, to walk outside without fear of preemptive police harassment. The long-term hatred and tension it engenders does far more harm to a community than all the questionable good that proponents ascribe to it. Security based on racism is a sham.
- [Spectator Wars](http://commonwonders.com/spectator-wars/) - “Pakistani authorities have long denounced the strikes, out of concern that civilian deaths caused by drone strikes inflame the local population, bolster militant groups and violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.” – CNN, July 26 Oh, the serious news! I read it with ever-fresh incredulity. It’s written for gamers. It reduces us to gamers as it updates us on the latest bends and twists in the geopolitical scene. We’re still playing War on Terror, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible; when they’re all dead, we win (apparently). The trick is to avoid inflaming the locals, who then transition out of passive irrelevance and join the insurgency. They get inflamed when we kill civilians, such as their children.
- [Reverence for Garbage](http://commonwonders.com/reverence-for-garbage/) - “My life would be worthless without music,” the girl said. And the music came, up from the garbage, through her hands and heart and out to the world. My god, she was playing a violin made out of an old can. A boy was playing a cello crafted with more love and ingenuity than I can imagine, from a used oil drum, old wool and tossed-out beef-tenderizing tools.
- [Embedded Racism](http://commonwonders.com/embedded-racism/) - Did the ghosts of our slave-holding and Jim Crow past high-five each other in the Florida courtroom on Saturday? George Zimmerman was acquitted, but does that mean that American history was, too? The experts who weighed in on the legal battle essentially noted that, in the absence of any witnesses other than Zimmerman, the prosecution couldn’t prove what had happened, or more to the point, couldn’t convincingly counter-argue his version of events – that he was returning to his car when Trayvon Martin assaulted him and threw him to the ground, forcing him to kill the boy in self-defense. Trayvon was dead; that left him, legally, voiceless and out of luck.
- [Privacy, Security and Sanity](http://commonwonders.com/privacy-security-and-sanity/) - What I keep longing to hear, in the hemorrhaging national debate about Edward Snowden, whistleblowing and the NSA, is some acknowledgment of what the word “security” actually means, and what role — if any — the government should play in creating it. “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy.” A moment of silence, please, for the dying patriarchy. That, of course, was how President Obama explained it to the American public shortly after the spy scandal hit the fan. When did we become “the children” in our relationship with the government, irrelevant to its day-to-day operations, utterly powerless as we stand in its massive, protecting shadow?
- [Magical Thinking](http://commonwonders.com/magical-thinking/) - My laptop started making funny noises a few days ago and I knew that wasn’t good. I’m embarrassed to say that my first instinct was to hope they’d just go away. I also had a quick, guilty thought about an essay by Umberto Eco I read some years back, comparing science and technology. Whereas the former involves a painstaking commitment to gather knowledge and understanding over the long haul, the latter hides the process of its becoming, simply giving the user a raw upgrade of power – instant, godlike. Wow, look what I can do! Technology encourages magical thinking, Eco wrote. And no piece of modern, reasonably priced technology spews magical thinking into the social arena more seductively than the computer.
- [The Naked Empire](http://commonwonders.com/the-naked-empire/) - America, America . . . Certainly Edward Snowden’s crime is one of public relations. In this day and age, power ain’t just jackboots, tanks and missiles. What he did by outing the NSA and its gargantuan surveillance operation was mess hugely with the American image — the American brand — with its irresistible combination of might and right.
- [Your Government on War](http://commonwonders.com/your-government-on-war/) - “Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament, designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms. . . . “While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both.”
- [For All Children Everywhere](http://commonwonders.com/for-all-children-everywhere/) - We can end war. Please, before you read on, let those four words float in silence for half a minute, until you actually hear them — until they come alive with meaning as insistent as a hatching egg. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may be to promote it, no matter how thoroughly it runs the global economy and dominates almost every government.
- [A Broken System Perpetuates Itself](http://commonwonders.com/a-broken-system-perpetuates-itself/) - Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.” — chorus of an 1828 minstrel song “We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.” — Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow Yeah, it’s called mass incarceration. Our jails are filled with black and brown men and women. The number of inmates, primarily people of color, has soared sevenfold in the last three decades, according to Alexander, from 300,000 to more than 2 million, the largest number, by far, in the developed world. Many millions more are on probation or parole. And no matter what their crime, the inmates never get their citizenship back. The stigma of being an ex-felon brands someone for life as a second-class human being.
- [The Lever of Social Action](http://commonwonders.com/the-lever-of-social-action/) - “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I think Archimedes was serious. I know we need to be. Now is the time to choose our future, as the Earth Charter declares. This means thinking big: embracing a vision so enormous it overflows our sense of the possible. For instance: “Beginning with even just a small group united behind a shared vision of how to end war by dismantling the war machine, it will be possible to rally the global community to the vision of a future in which war is no longer something we accept.” So Judith Hand wrote recently at the blog A Future Without War.
- [Rape and Winning](http://commonwonders.com/rape-and-winning/) - Maybe the problem is that rape is an extension of military culture. And it’s metastasizing, even as legislation to address it stays trapped in congressional subcommittee. Scandals and outrage come and go, but rape is ever-present. In 2011, a Pentagon report estimated that 19,000 sexual assaults had occurred in the U.S. military, of which barely 3,000 were reported because of the stigma and risk involved in doing so. The “I own you” system of military justice traditionally turns on the victim far more than the accused. That year, in response to the shocking statistics, U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would, among other things, remove the investigation of rape cases from the military chain of command, which has far more interest in ignoring the problem than prosecuting it.
- [Know-Nothing Security](http://commonwonders.com/know-nothing-security/) - Let’s all work together to stop terrorism! The Palm Beach County, Fla. Sheriff’s Office has a new video out urging local citizens to call them if something smells bad or seems a little weird, like, oh, a tourist is taking a picture of a bridge but there’s no one in the foreground — no spouse, no grinning kids, just . . . a bridge.
- [Indefinite Enemies](http://commonwonders.com/indefinite-enemies/) - You’re strapped to a metal table, unable to move. They stick a two-foot plastic tube up your nose, then down the back of your throat into your stomach. They squirt in the liquid protein. You gag, bleed, vomit. It’s unbearably painful. The practice of involuntary force-feeding is condemned by most medical organizations, including the AMA. It’s banned by most governments. It’s torture.
- [A Floor of Decency](http://commonwonders.com/a-floor-of-decency/) - “Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air.” We move from tragedy to tragedy with hellish regularity.
- [Chasing Infinity](http://commonwonders.com/chasing-infinity/) - In the new security state, not even garbage will have privacy. “Terrorism,” the Chicago Sun-Times informed us last week, “has created a new market in Chicago and other big cities for a company that started out making bear resistant garbage containers about 14 years ago.”
- [Drone World](http://commonwonders.com/drone-world/) - In the not so distant future, America’s skies will be full of . . . drones. What could go wrong? “Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “groups from California to Florida are fiercely competing to become one of six federally designated sites for testing how the remotely piloted aircraft can safely be incorporated into the nation’s airspace.”
- [A Future Stuck in the Pipeline](http://commonwonders.com/a-future-stuck-in-the-pipeline/) - Are the bad ideas dead yet? You know, the ones that have been hollowing out the country’s soul for the last 30 years. In Atlanta, they just indicted 35 teachers, principals and administrators, including a former superintendent, for routinely altering their students’ standardized test results — and in all likelihood this massive fraud is an aberration only because the cheaters got caught.
- [Ending Violence in a Decade](http://commonwonders.com/ending-violence-in-a-decade/) - “The status quo in Chicago is no longer tolerable,” Andy Willis said, summoning the violent headlines of the past year and the past week. This was Palm Sunday, in a church basement in a big-city neighborhood, and the time had come to stand for something enormous. My God, a six-month-old baby, Jonylah Watkins, was shot and killed this month in Chicago, as her father held her on his lap while sitting in a parked van. That was just the latest shocker. Violence is the norm, in this city and so many others. The death of children is the norm.
- [Soul Poison](http://commonwonders.com/soul-poison/) - We’ve lost a war without being able to surrender — and thus divest ourselves of the consciousness that got us into it. We are unable to look honestly at what we did and why, and determine not to do it again. My friend Catherine Menninger sent me a note the other day that began: “The days are long past when the poison of DU (depleted uranium) was our shared preoccupation. Now an even deeper poison, a soul poison, is seeping into the body politic and beyond. It is touching us all.”
- [A Shortage of Mercy](http://commonwonders.com/a-shortage-of-mercy/) - “Indeed,” writes David Korten, “we have become so entranced in the illusion that money is a measure of real wealth and a storehouse of value that we have allowed it to displace life as our object of sacred veneration and become the ultimate arbiter of human priorities.” As the economy twists downward for most of us — as the politics of money tightens like a noose around everything we love — I think about the disintegration of human values, which insane logic and the Republicans tells us we can no longer afford.
- [Abu Ghraib Revisited](http://commonwonders.com/abu-ghraib-revisited/) - Philip Zimbardo’s TED Talk on Abu Ghraib and “The Psychology of Evil” is up to 2,374,000 hits. Apparently people are hungry to know about the deep psychology of American foreign policy. And perhaps they’re hungry to look, again . . . again . . . at the Abu Ghraib torture photos that first surfaced in 2004. Cruelty and evil inspire a twisted awe; they pull us into the black hole of our own heart, where we see ourselves in hideous distortion.
- [The Separation of Profit and State](http://commonwonders.com/the-separation-of-profit-and-state/) - Sometimes what I fear most is that the disintegration of public life — indeed, the very idea of the public good — is complete. The vultures and profiteers swarm around the carcass and make a profit and that’s all that matters. Thirty years on, the Reagan Revolution has done its job, or nearly so. There’s no sustaining integrity left to how our society is organized, no principle that can’t be gamed for private benefit. And even awareness of all this has been successfully marginalized. We still proclaim ourselves, in the prevailing media, the world’s oldest, greatest democracy, and worship the old rituals.
- [War's Lingering Phantoms](http://commonwonders.com/wars-lingering-phantoms/) - “War’s lingering phantoms haunt every society.” As two hellish, costly and needless wars struggle toward collapse, this is the time — now, right this minute, before the next false alarm goes off — for us to look honestly at the cost and quality of national security based on militarism. It’s time to squeeze the romance out of war and get it through our heads that war is not inevitable.
- [Controlling Lucifer](http://commonwonders.com/controlling-lucifer/) - The president negotiates our withdrawal from Afghanistan, proclaims mission accomplished — and the wars of the last decade continue winding down to nothing. We’ll be leaving behind an unstable country with one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates and hundreds of armed insurgent groups. We haven’t rescued or rebuilt the country or accomplished any objective that begins to justify the human and financial cost of this adventure. We just lost.
- [I Am Because You Are](http://commonwonders.com/i-am-because-you-are/) - Their grief is too profound and too public. Their words have to be taken seriously — allowed to mix with the politics and the self-interest and the fear, those generic trivializers of the national conversation. “This is a Promise we make to our precious children. Because each child, every human life is filled with promise, and though we continue to be filled with unbearable pain we choose love, belief, and hope instead of anger.”
- [The Empowerment Project: the column](http://commonwonders.com/the-empowerment-project-the-column/) - Finally, perhaps, this is bigger than personal safety. It’s about rescuing our humanity. Two images compete for my attention as I write this, a month after Newtown, a week after the shooting at a high school in Taft, Calif., with hundreds of murders in between. One image is of Robbie Parker, father of slain 6-year-old Emilie, offering public condolences to the family of the shooter and pleading, through his tears, “Let it” — the murders of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School — “not turn into something that defines us, but something that inspires us to be more compassionate and humble people.”
- [The Empowerment Project](http://commonwonders.com/the-empowerment-project/) - This is an ongoing project. Stories will be added as they come in. My intention is to puncture the idea that we must be armed to be empowered, indeed, to break the grip that guns have on our society and pierce what theologian Walter Wink calls The Myth of Redemptive Violence: the notion that some violence is good.
- [Unarmed Empowerment](http://commonwonders.com/unarmed-empowerment/) - “But my instinct was that if someone is shooting at you, it is generally better to shoot back than to cower and pray.” This is the hidden argument for guns as America’s primary peacekeepers — that the debate comes down to gun ownership vs. helplessness.
- [The Social Context of Mass Murder](http://commonwonders.com/the-social-context-of-mass-murder/) - Hey, loser! And so the nail is driven in. This is isolation; this is the coffin. And there are so many ways of saying it. The social context of being human has been shattered for far too many people, and one manifestation of this is the eerie rise in mass murders — seemingly senseless, impersonal rampages — over the last four or five decades. Since the 1960s, they have increased fourteenfold in the United States, far exceeding the rise in population, according to sociologist Peter Turchin, whose four-part essay, “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” ran at Social Evolution Forum shortly after the Newtown killings.
- [The American Paradox](http://commonwonders.com/the-american-paradox/) - “Evil visited this community today,” the governor of Connecticut said, though he might have been more accurate if he had quoted Pogo. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
- [A Gospel of Wealth](http://commonwonders.com/a-gospel-of-wealth/) - “I’m pregnant,” she said. Well, OK. She wanted $4. I could have done the “pretend not to see you” thing. Taking that option is part of life these days, especially in Chicago. She’d been standing in the middle of the intersection, trying to get money so that — if she was to be believed —she and her daughter could get dinner at the McDonald’s on the corner. When the light changed, she came over to me. I was out for a walk. It was a beautiful, cold December night.
- [Pile of Skulls](http://commonwonders.com/pile-of-skulls/) - The boy is in his bed crying because there’s a monster in the room. Dad walks in, snaps on the light . . . This is the setup for Joe Dator’s macabre, punch-in-the-nose-funny cartoon in a recent New Yorker. “See,” says Dad as he points to the wall, “there’s no monster in the corner — it’s just a pile of old skulls.”
- [Brand Names and Mass Graves](http://commonwonders.com/brand-names-and-mass-graves/) - Cheap clothes! Their cost, it turns out, is beyond calculation. “Babul Mia said he identified his wife Mariam Begum, 25, who was apparently burnt beyond recognition, but he could identify her bangles and her small teeth,” reported Bangladesh’s main English-language newspaper, The Daily Star.
- [Honor and Rape](http://commonwonders.com/honor-and-rape/) - Here’s one take on U.S. militarism and the culture of domination: “Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight.
- [An America Yet To Be Born](http://commonwonders.com/an-america-yet-to-be-born/) - Legalization of pot (in Colorado and Washington state), a big hurray for gay marriage (in Maine), lots of progressive women in the Senate and resounding defeat for the champions of “legitimate rape” (Akin, Mourdock) — oh my! Election Day 2012 went better than I thought it would. And Barack Obama, the designated Lesser Evil, clobbered Mitt Romney in the swing states, despite Republican efforts to keep likely Democrats from voting there. I went to bed last night feeling an irrational joy, an enormous inner cry of relief, that the neocons and right-wing crazies were held at bay for four more years.
- [Hurricane Sandy and the Living Planet](http://commonwonders.com/hurricane-sandy-and-the-living-planet/) - Suddenly we all know Sandy, the superstorm that whacked New York City, left 55 people dead across the East Coast — and about that many in Haiti as well — knocked out power to millions and caused some $20 billion worth of property damage. What I find fascinating is that the storm has a name.
- [The Future of Politics](http://commonwonders.com/the-future-of-politics/) - “I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan.” I listen to these words with fresh awe, 40 years later. They pierce the soul. Once upon a time, presidential politics was this open, this responsive to moral concerns. The speaker, of course, was George McGovern. The words, delivered during the Democratic National Convention in 1972 — and the campaign that followed — represent the political high-water mark of the social change movements of the 1960s.
- [The Moral Equivalent of Nuremberg](http://commonwonders.com/the-moral-equivalent-of-nuremberg/) - My favorite quote was from the British government spokesperson, who assured us: “All ammunition used by UK armed forces falls within international humanitarian law and is consistent with the Geneva Convention.” Tears come to my eyes as I think about the kindness of coalition bullets, the empathy of coalition bombs — unlike, I’m certain, the ammo used by terrorists, which is cruel, which hates our way of life and wants only to destroy it.
- [Empire and Its Consequences](http://commonwonders.com/empire-and-its-consequences/) - Ever notice the way certain basic human values quietly transform into their opposite on their way to becoming national policy? At the human level, the immorality of murder is fundamental, and most people understand the insanity of armed hatred. Keeping these dark forces under wraps is essential to the existence of human society. So why is it, then, that at the abstract level of nationalism, those forces are honored, worshiped, saluted, extolled as glorious, and given command of an enormous budget?
- [War, Vets and Moral Injury](http://commonwonders.com/war-vets-and-moral-injury/) - It’s not just suicide. It’s also drug overdose, car crash — quasi- or secret suicide, carried out in fearful isolation. Young Iraq and Afghanistan vets are dying in increasing numbers by their own hands in “a largely unseen pattern of early deaths that federal authorities are failing to adequately track and have been slow to respond to,” according to a recent story in the Austin American-Statesman based on a six-month investigation of the causes of death of 266 Texas veterans, out of the 345 known to the Veterans Administration to have died since their return from duty. At least 142 of those deaths were self-inflicted in one way or another.
- [The Buzzing Wasps](http://commonwonders.com/the-buzzing-wasps/) - Somewhere between predatory self-interest and insanity lies the drone. The war on terror, the testing ground for drone technology, may be no more than the threshold of a brand new, barely imagined form of human hell: hell that buzzes like a wasp. How long before the technology comes home to our own neighborhoods?
- [The Innocence of U.S. Foreign Policy](http://commonwonders.com/the-innocence-of-u-s-foreign-policy/) - The Saturday headline in the Wall Street Journal was: “Anti-U.S. Mobs on Rampage.” The next day, a NATO airstrike killed eight women collecting firewood in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an event that garnered virtually zero mainstream U.S. headlines.
- [Pragmatic Racism](http://commonwonders.com/pragmatic-racism/) - No, it’s not the brutal, hate-twisted racism of the old days. Today’s Republicans are capable of adoring select right-wing African-Americans. The Jim Crow revival they’re pushing — the large-scale disenfranchisement of primarily minority voters — is pragmatic. They’re outnumbered. They couldn’t win a fair national election. What a dilemma for such a righteous political organization. Winning — securing power, implementing their agenda — is the whole point, and that means they have no choice but to put the big squeeze on Democrat-leaning voting blocs. And the most obvious of those blocs are racial and ethnic.
- [The Breton Fisherman's Prayer](http://commonwonders.com/the-breton-fishermans-prayer/) - “Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” The Arctic ice is melting at a record pace this summer — just one more measurable phenomenon indicating that extraordinary change in the global ecosystem is in progress. As the ice melts, and the vast polar reflecting surface diminishes, the planet absorbs more and more of the sun’s energy and . . . grows warmer. More ice melts.
- [Rape, Patriarchy and the Bomb](http://commonwonders.com/rape-patriarchy-and-the-bomb/) - “Every sperm is sacred . . .” Todd Akin could have worked on the script for the 1983 Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But wait, there’s more. “But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something,” the Missouri Senate candidate said in his recent, now infamous TV interview. “You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be at the rapist and not attacking the child.”
- [Beyond Money](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-money/) - “Everyone loved him.” The hole was too deep; these words couldn’t fill it. But there they remain, floating on the regret, vibrant with the possibility of a different kind of world. We’ve always been in the process of building that world, but the process has lacked a central cohesion . . . a god, if you will, to bless it and keep it.
- [Nuclear Righteousness](http://commonwonders.com/nuclear-righteousness/) - This is American exceptionalism: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” But you have to say it without the doubt, the regret — the horror — of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist extraordinaire and director of the Manhattan Project, who famously uttered these words in reference to the Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945.
- [Community in the Crosshairs](http://commonwonders.com/community-in-the-crosshairs/) - We wrecked Iraq, we pulled out, we redeployed in Anaheim. This ain’t working, guys — I mean, firing rubber bullets into anguished crowds, siccing attack dogs on moms and children. I mean, inventing enemies, going to war, unleashing state-of-the-art firepower in all directions and eventually losing, but not before we’ve inflicted maximum suffering on the innocent and magnified the original problem tenfold.
- [Good Violence, Bad Violence](http://commonwonders.com/good-violence-bad-violence/) - “In the end, after he has felt the full force of our justice system, what will be remembered are the good people who were impacted by this tragedy,” President Obama said this week in Aurora, Colo., after the shootings. That’s probably not true. From Charles Whitman up to the present day, the collective American memory preserves the name of the killer . . . the lone psycho, the shadow hero. We’re far too fascinated with violence not to mythologize its perpetrators. And just as we all know (because the media tell us) that there will be a “next war,” we know, oh God, in the deep churnings of the heart, that there will be more murder victims — schoolchildren, college students, shoppers, churchgoers, theatergoers, bystanders. We know because we live in a culture that tolerates and perpetuates violence.
- [The Geopolitics of Compassion](http://commonwonders.com/the-geopolitics-of-compassion/) - Beyond the spectacle of the presidential race, the Washington consensus pursues business as usual. This is the season in which I wonder, with an ever-intensifying sense of urgency, what it would take to turn our political system into a democracy. “And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the national security complex continues to accelerate,” Tom Engelhardt wrote earlier this month. “The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself. . . .”
- [War and Climate Change](http://commonwonders.com/war-and-climate-change/) - The heat backs up across the country, causing drought, wildfires, a mega-storm on the East Coast. More than 4,000 “hottest day” records have been shattered in the U.S. in the past month. “The ecological ego matures,” Theodore Roszak wrote 20 years ago in The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, “toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.”
- [For Love or Money](http://commonwonders.com/for-love-or-money/) - Poverty has always been the shadow of prosperity, but now we have an advancing global depression creating more of it — pulling in more and more of the middle class, the folks who aren’t used to it. This is where the headlines are. Oh, the drama. A suicide epidemic manifests in struggling Europe: “On March 28, Giuseppe Campaniello set himself on fire in front of the Equitalia office” — Italy’s tax-collection agency — “in Bologna after he received a final notice about the doubling of a fine he could not pay,” Newsweek reported last week. “He died in a burn ward nine days later.”
- [God, Money and Planet Earth](http://commonwonders.com/god-money-and-planet-earth/) - Earth hovers on the brink of ecological catastrophe — actually, 20 years closer to the brink than it was at the first global climate summit, in 1992. “Deserts continue to expand. The loss of plant and animal species has accelerated . . . . And greenhouse gases have continued to build up in the atmosphere,” the Los Angeles explains. No matter that, 20 years ago, most nations of the world “signed off on a long list of goals and agreements” designed to ensure a different future. Nothing came of it.
- [Progressive Morality](http://commonwonders.com/progressive-morality/) - To what extent will progressive morality be a factor in the looming presidential election? Is it simply a nuisance? Will mainstream Democrats (yet again) cringe in its presence, disavow it, spout mostly Republican-lite platitudes about tough-guy patriotism -- and, positioning themselves, as ever, as the Lesser of Two Evils, count the progressive vote as theirs? The election season, which ought to be more about promoting values than candidates, is barely about values at all, except as weaknesses to manipulate.
- [Realists Play Video Games](http://commonwonders.com/realists-play-video-games/) - St. Augustine blesses the kill list. And liberalism is just a nicer, slicker, more PR-savvy way of carrying on the brutal work of empire. Behold President Obama, on the second day of his presidency, flanked by retired generals and admirals, signing an executive order to ban torture and declaring that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would soon be closed — fulfilling, in other words, some serious campaign promises.
- [The Grim Reaper](http://commonwonders.com/the-grim-reaper/) - The poison seeps slowly into the future. No one notices. “The Obama administration,” the Wall Street Journal informs us, “plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced hunter-killer drone technology to other allies . . .” I can’t quite get beyond the name: Reaper drones?
- [The Pits of Hell](http://commonwonders.com/the-pits-of-hell/) - This week’s NATO summit on the future of the war in Afghanistan probably did not get to the matter of burn pits or abandoned latrines. These are the details of hell. They are also our legacy, in Afghanistan, in Iraq . . . wherever we employ our military to pursue our geopolitical self-interest. Strip away the propaganda, strip away the politics and the pursuit of strategic advantage, and what American/NATO policy amounts to is burned, buried, dumped and abandoned waste, some of it radioactive, most of it toxic.
- [Violence and Greeting Cards](http://commonwonders.com/violence-and-greeting-cards/) - “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies . . .” My thanks to Medea Benjamin for her recent Common Dreams essay putting the spirit of Julia Ward Howe back into Mother’s Day. I’d forgotten about her 1870 proclamation of disarmament and call to the mothers of Planet Earth to come together in collective counsel “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
- [State of Fear](http://commonwonders.com/state-of-fear/) - This was the headline: “Zimmerman, Martin’s parents to face off in court.” 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.
- [Growing up, Falling in Love](http://commonwonders.com/growing-up-falling-in-love/) - The AP story on military maneuvers in the Arctic reads like the gleeful report of a mugging. “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.”
- [Chemical Warfare](http://commonwonders.com/chemical-warfare/) - To fight our insane wars, we’re wrecking our soldiers’ ability to live with themselves and function in society, then regulating what’s left of them with chemicals, which often make things immeasurably worse. 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?
- [Finding the Wisdom We Need To Survive](http://commonwonders.com/finding-the-wisdom-we-need-to-survive/) - I’m far more interested in forgiveness than justice. 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.
- [THE BAD APPLE](http://commonwonders.com/the-bad-apple/) - So it turns out that mass-murder suspect Robert Bales once used a bad word in a Facebook conversation. 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.
- [Death and Public Relations](http://commonwonders.com/death-and-public-relations/) - The killer was in his fourth deployment. He walked from his base to one village, then another, leaving behind the lunacy and spiritual wreckage of American foreign policy. Then he walked back to his base and calmly turned himself in. 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
- [Cancer of the Spirit](http://commonwonders.com/cancer-of-the-spirit/) - Can we squeeze the glory out of the word “war”? Can we talk about savage irrationality and lifelong inner hell instead? Can we talk about the wreckage of two countries? 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.
- [A Green Tree in Your Heart](http://commonwonders.com/a-green-tree-in-your-heart/) - “Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.” 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.
- [Saying No to Militarism](http://commonwonders.com/saying-no-to-militarism/) - No mail on Saturday, maybe, but small-town police get armored personnel carriers? Let’s take a moment — in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama’s recent austerity budget proposal — to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we’re creating.
- [Happy Savages](http://commonwonders.com/happy-savages/) - “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.
- [The Barbara Tree](http://commonwonders.com/the-barbara-tree/) - 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.
- [Works in Progress](http://commonwonders.com/works-in-progress/) - 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.
- [The Dignity of Corpses](http://commonwonders.com/the-dignity-of-corpses/) - 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.
- [A Momentum of Cynicism](http://commonwonders.com/a-momentum-of-cynicism/) - 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.
- [The Hollow Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/the-hollow-democracy/) - 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.
- [The Big Lie Marches on](http://commonwonders.com/the-big-lie-marches-on/) - 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!
- [The Spiritual Jackpot](http://commonwonders.com/the-spiritual-jackpot/) - 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.
- [Used-up Heroes](http://commonwonders.com/used-up-heroes/) - 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.
- [Project Bugsplat](http://commonwonders.com/project-bugsplat/) - “The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest, waste, weed . . .” But what about “bugsplat”? That’s the word for the cop at UC Davis, walking up and down the line of students sitting with their arms locked, zapping them in the eyes with pepper spray. It’s the word for the Tunisian police and bureaucrats who humiliated Mohamed Bouazizi and destroyed his livelihood as a street vendor. It’s the word for anyone whose power exceeds his humanity.
- [Saluting Rapists](http://commonwonders.com/saluting-rapists/) - Remember that awkward silence that fell across the nation back in ’94 when Bill Clinton’s surgeon general used the M-word? Jocelyn Elders, speaking at an AIDS conference at the U.N. about reducing the risk of sexually transmitted disease, said that masturbation “is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.”
- [Sanity in Exile](http://commonwonders.com/sanity-in-exile/) - Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . . Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.” The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.
- [Public Enemy No. 1](http://commonwonders.com/public-enemy-no-1/) - “Play faster!” he cried, wildly, over and over. “Play faster!” The dame who was tickling the ivories complied, out of control herself. The music revved to a dangerous velocity — oh, too fast for decent, sober, well-behaved Americans to bear — and . . . well, you just knew, violence, madness, laughter were just around the corner. The year was 1936 and, oh my God, they were high on marijuana, public enemy number one.
- [The News of Empire](http://commonwonders.com/the-news-of-empire/) - “Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.” I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
- [Iraq Syndrome](http://commonwonders.com/iraq-syndrome/) - This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq. But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.
- [The Abandoned Class](http://commonwonders.com/the-abandoned-class/) - Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase? Will it find a voice to articulate not merely the pain of the struggling middle class but the endemic unfairness and racism of inescapable poverty? “Everyone is important,” read the sign of an elderly protester. My God, what if it were true? What if we could see, in the desperate thrashing of the abandoned class, everyone’s future, that of the 99 percent and that of the 1 percent?
- [Our Overripe Moment](http://commonwonders.com/our-overripe-moment/) - “The Future is calling and has some serious concerns. Please pick up.” It’s a Sunday afternoon, fivish, the sun is sinking and a chill is in the air. Ah, Chicago, vibrant with culture, crime and capital, but sort of dead at this hour of the ebbing weekend. I’m downtown and I’m not sure if the future is calling, but my heart is pounding as I walk west on Jackson to LaSalle, in the shadow of the great edifices of capitalism.
- [Beyond the Nation-State](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-the-nation-state/) - Is there such a thing as a relaxed nation — one that isn’t, you know, obsessed with its borders and sense of identity? We can easily see how absurd it all is when we read about the hikers recently released from prison in Iran, where they were held in cruelly restricted confinement for more than two years because they had inadvertently strayed across the border, out of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The inhuman nature of Iran’s response — the trumped up charges of espionage against the two young men, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, and their companion, Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned for over a year — were gleefully obvious to the American media . . . because they were Americans, and Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.
- [The Old Integrity](http://commonwonders.com/the-old-integrity/) - The old order and the old integrity slowly collapse, but the statues remain, and the words. How odd they sound: “The founder of the University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller, on December 13, 1910, made provision for the erection of this chapel and thus defined its purpose: As the spirit of religion should penetrate and control the university, so that building which represents religion ought to be the central and dominant feature of the university group. Thus it will be proclaimed that the university is dominated by the spirit of religion. All its departments are inspired by religious feeling, and all its work is directed to the highest ends.”
- [The Theology of Armageddon](http://commonwonders.com/the-theology-of-armageddon/) - The woo-woo nuttiness of it all defies the imagination, beginning with the idea of a course in “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Nuclear ethics? Does that mean no nuclear weapons should ever be used to promote sexual harassment?
- [Captives to the Logic of Violence](http://commonwonders.com/captives-to-the-logic-of-violence/) - A decade later. The abyss keeps deepening, the wars keep squandering our blood and treasure beyond all logic except the logic of violence. What ended on Sept. 11, 2001, it sometimes seems, was human evolution. Suddenly, an irreparable schism opened between those in power and the rest of humankind, and a decision fell into place that war for profit would never end — and there was nothing to be done about it, as the corporate media conveyed to the world with a knowing shrug. What fell into place was armed insanity as perpetual background noise, and any reach toward global community, understanding and forgiveness went on permanent hold.
- [Internal Combustion](http://commonwonders.com/internal-combustion/) - What entitlement! I hit the gas, power off to my destination. No one asks me whether the trip is serious or banal, necessary or foolish, conscious or impulsive. I just go, ripping up the miles as though they were daydreams. The engine purrs. My name is Everyman, and I have the power of gods. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not addicted or anything. I can get off oil whenever I want to. On the other hand, I may be willing to sacrifice 740,000 acres of pristine boreal forest in Northern Canada — part of one of the largest intact ecosystems left on the planet — along with, oh, 166 million birds, and all the remaining caribou in Alberta, before I do. Tough call.
- [Common Sense in a Coma](http://commonwonders.com/common-sense-in-a-coma/) - “Then there is the issue of how the Afghans will be able to pay for their greatly enlarged police and military, which by some estimates will require $10 billion a year to sustain come 2014 — 10 times the Afghan government’s annual tax revenues.” Of all the ironic absurdities and preposterous twists in the war on — I mean the war to promote — terror, this quote from the New York Times back in April, which I came upon as I was researching something called the Strategic Partnership Declaration between the United States and Afghanistan, felt the most like a mugging.
- [Equal and Opposite Lunacy](http://commonwonders.com/equal-and-opposite-lunacy/) - As crashing economies and austerity measures slap ever more ferociously at the lives of the vulnerable and disenfranchised, the Western world, with all its hidden poverty and institutional racism, may continue to convulse. The riots that broke out in London over the weekend and spread throughout Great Britain, triggered by the controversial police killing of a 29-year-old man, have sent shockwaves in all directions. Who knew things were so unstable, that Britain’s struggling neighborhoods were just one incident away from such destructive lunacy?
- [The Sky Is Weeping](http://commonwonders.com/the-sky-is-weeping/) - When our lives are torn open, when the worst possible thing happens, what we have, finally, are our roses and our courage. “I chose to stay in Oslo the entire week. It has felt like the most natural thing to do. I have never experienced any place any time in my life with such a complete absence of aggression. It feels like the city itself has gone into a peaceful place.”
- [Blaming the Muslims](http://commonwonders.com/blaming-the-muslims/) - “I saw people being shot. I tried to sit as quietly as possible. I was hiding behind some stones. I saw him once, just 20, 30 meters away from me. I thought ‘I’m terrified for my life,’” the young survivor said to a Reuters reporter. “I thought of all the people I love.” And there’s the moment, in all its politics and horror: no more than this. Young adults — teenagers — being stalked and methodically murdered at their bucolic summer camp on Utoya Island in Norway. In God’s name, why?
- [Military-Industrial Journalism](http://commonwonders.com/military-industrial-journalism/) - Rupert Murdoch’s specialty has been the practice of journalism in cynical mockery of our thirst for knowledge. Suddenly it’s clear to everyone. Hacking a missing teenager’s cell phone? Deleting calls, interfering with the desperate search for her whereabouts? Tapping the phones of terrorist victims, dead soldiers? What kind of newsroom culture could possibly value the intimate tidbits of unbearable worry and sorrow thus obtained? What kind of organization would call it “news”?
- [Panetta's Gaffe](http://commonwonders.com/panettas-gaffe/) - Leon Panetta, on his first visit to Iraq as secretary of defense last weekend, reached for a Bush moment ten years too late. “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he said to the assembled troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad, according to the Washington Post. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaida. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”
- [The Five-Fingered Ways of Knowing](http://commonwonders.com/the-five-fingered-ways-of-knowing/) - “We are a people who never made singing or dancing an unrespected way of knowing. All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us.” For anyone trapped in Western consciousness, here’s some good news. The Earth has nearly completed a revolution around the sun since Woman Stands Shining, a.k.a., Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar, spoke those words at the 12th Language of Spirit Conference. That means the 13th annual conference — a dialogue “exploring the nature of reality,” among aboriginal scientists, scholars, healers and artists and their Western counterparts in a wide array of fields — is coming up soon.
- [The End Times](http://commonwonders.com/the-end-times/) - “All the evidence shows that we are nearing the end of man’s tragic experiment in independence from God.” Wow, I thought. They get it. And suddenly I felt a burst of solidarity with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The words are from one of their tracts, which was given to me because I have this passion for talking about God — a wild glee, almost, for stepping up to The Big Serious and wrestling theology with the neighborhood proselytizers.
- [Mohammed at Four O'Clock](http://commonwonders.com/mohammed-at-four-oclock/) - What’s so funny about …? Oh, let’s say, a Muslim guy walking through the airport, or the bride of Frankenstein … or saliva. It’s all there — and more! — at an exhibit called “What Makes Us Smile?” at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which I saw with my daughter a few days ago. Even though the world is still caught in the jaws of hell, I decided to write about this raw celebration of humor because the tears of amazement and joy that flowed as I walked through it felt like my definition of peace.
- [Predator Syndrome](http://commonwonders.com/predator-syndrome/) - There are twenty thousand nuclear weapons on the planet, a quarter of them ready for launch at a moment’s suicidal impulse, aimed at countries that stopped being enemies two decades ago. It’s six minutes to midnight. “Disarmament” has as much cachet in America’s corridors of power as “socialism.” And the U.S. House, bless its evil heart, has just sliced the Achilles tendon of peace. It recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, which has many seriously worrisome provisions, two of which stand in stark, grinning contrast to one another.
- [A Bad Day That Never Changes](http://commonwonders.com/a-bad-day-that-never-changes/) - I get so soul-sick of the war news because it’s a bad day that never changes. Over the weekend, NATO kills 14 people in an airstrike in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Ten of them are children. President Karzai cries, “No more!” A NATO spokesperson pats him on the head, regretfully shrugging that the alliance works hard to “limit” civilian casualties. Oh sacred Earth . . .
- [Ignorant Certainty](http://commonwonders.com/ignorant-certainty/) - Now that the end of the world didn’t happen, I can’t stop thinking about it. What chutzpah, what a diminished worldview, not simply to make such a prediction, but — even more incomprehensible, to my relentlessly self-questioning mind — to know you’ll be among the saved. In 1011, a guy like Harold Camping would probably have been able to generate more panic than bemusement. A millennium later, with science taught in the public schools and all, we have a little more collective resistance to such thundering certainty leaping from highway billboards. I confess, however, to feeling a deep, reptilian tug last Friday morning, as I saw the sign — SAVE THIS DATE, MAY 21, 2011, CHRIST IS COMING — while driving through eastern Wisconsin. Yikes, that’s tomorrow.
- [Raw Heart](http://commonwonders.com/raw-heart/) - Frank Ferrante, an overweight guy with deep spiritual wounds and an enormous sense of humor, thought he was signing onto a sort of vegan life fix: 42 days of raw foods, a shot of liquefied wheatgrass every morning, exercise, weigh-ins, holistic medical exams, weekly colonics, daily affirmations. And then all of a sudden he’d be thin and happy. But transformation isn’t a technical fix. What Frank learned — and what we learn as well as we travel the journey with him in a powerful, intensely honest documentary called May I Be Frank — is that transformation turns you inside out.
- [Wanted Dead or Alive](http://commonwonders.com/wanted-dead-or-alive/) - When President Obama, summing up the killing of Osama bin Laden, said, “Justice has been done,” the problem wasn’t simply that he misspoke — justice, after all, can only emerge at the end of an impartial judicial proceeding — but that, in so misspeaking, he hit the emotional bull’s-eye. “Justice has been done.” We got him, America! Oh yeah, sweet! Who can’t feel the pop of satisfaction in those words? “He should have said, ‘Retaliation has been accomplished,’” Marjorie Cohn pointed out recently at Common Dreams, and that’s true, of course, but the president wasn’t summoning the dry, sober rule of law. He was evoking, just as George W. Bush did before him, the Wild West, America’s deepest font of mythology, where justice, you know, comes from the muzzle of a revolver. As with Geronimo, so with Osama: Wanted Dead or Alive.
- [The Unholy Grail](http://commonwonders.com/the-unholy-grail/) - Perhaps the eeriest thing about Osama bin Laden’s death is how little it means. Yeah, I know: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The raid on the devil’s compound outside Abbottabad, Pakistan this week apparently kick-started our patriotic fervor, which had been languishing over the course of a pretty bad decade of military quagmire and economic collapse. Killing Osama — turning him, as the New York Times put it, into “a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head” — brought back a rush of national purpose and glory.
- [BELIEVE IN VIOLENCE AND BE SAVED](http://commonwonders.com/believe-in-violence-and-be-saved/) - A dozen years ago, before 9/11, before Bush Jr. or the war on terror, Bill Clinton, then in the midst of impeachment hearings, bombed Iraq over a four-day period. Shortly before this act of national distraction, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune discussing, with the knowing, amoral inanity of the mainstream media, the international implications of the pending action. For me, the article was immortalized by the following pull-quote from an anonymous Jordanian official, which crystallized the cynicism of geopolitics and the way nation-states function: “Look, nobody here likes Saddam, but people will not be happy when they see Iraqi babies dying on TV.”
- [TRANSCENDING PROGRESSIVE DISCORD](http://commonwonders.com/transcending-progressive-discord/) - “Barack Obama was NEVER a progressive or anything other than a closet Republican. This was true in ’08 and continues to be true. He successfully hoodwinked millions of people who chose not to listen to what he actually said in his interviews (not in his rally speeches; one-on-one interviews). I tried to warn people about this monster but it fell on deaf ears.” “I think President Obama is doing a fine job with the cards he has been dealt — the worst oppositional party in history, a lame constituency in his own party, a fragmented base, and a raging ‘left’ who have no concept of the reality of our government or our American mindset, much less any constructive ideas on how to change them.”
- [REIGNITING THE SPIRIT OF ’08](http://commonwonders.com/reigniting-the-spirit-of-08/) - The candidate of soaring hope turns out to govern as a middle-of-the-road Republican, progressive — “socialist” — only in the labels of vilification stuck on him by his opponents. The great uprising of spirit that swept Barack Obama into office in 2008 has dissipated, morphed into private frustration. Life goes on. The political landscape has never been safer for business as usual.
- [THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT](http://commonwonders.com/the-invisible-government/) - Once again, the curtain of secrecy is drawn back and Olympus looks more like Oz. The machinations of empire turn out to be banal and ordinary. In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo . . . we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.
- [PEDDLING WAR TO CHILDREN](http://commonwonders.com/the-invisible-government-2/) - In the gap between a boy’s passionate fantasies and the smell of dead bodies in a mass grave marches . . . America’s Army. “He wonders if God is punishing him because before he joined the Army he thought of war as something fun and exciting.” We couldn’t wage our current wars without the all-volunteer military whose recruitment goals get fed every year by idealistic young people, who continue, despite all counter-evidence bursting off the front pages, to buy into the romance and excitement of war and armed do-goodism that the recruiters, with the help of a vast “militainment” industry, peddle like so many Joe Camels.
- [A RAPTURE OF HUMUS](http://commonwonders.com/short-essay-on-our-humble-piles-a-rapture-of-humus-and-human-aversion-to-waste/) - Day after the election and, wow, there it was, a story in my local paper that cried out that the world was changing in a sensible direction. I simply had to stare at it for a while before I could even read it. The world-changing aspect was simply the fact that the paper - the Chicago Tribune, which I don't expect to cross serious taboo lines - ran it at all, as a feature story in its Chicagoland section: "Taking the 'waste' out of human waste," by Lauren R. Harrison.
- [The Party of Organized Money](http://commonwonders.com/the-party-of-organized-money/) - Thud goes hope. Whatever the causes of "voter dissatisfaction" and voter despair that gave the party of destruction so much power back, I sit in dread the next morning not so much of the results as of the phenomenon of openly purchased elections. "The midterms have shattered spending records for a nonpresidential contest, providing a likely blueprint for the frenzy to come when the White House is up for grabs in two years."
- [Defying a Superpower](http://commonwonders.com/defying-a-superpower/) - WikiLeaks has given us another cold bath in reality: "As the vehicle approached Post 7, the Marines on post used hand and arm signals but the vehicle did not yield. The Marine at Post 7 employed a pop-up flare when the approaching vehicle was 200m S of the post and the vehicle continued. "The Marine on post then engaged the vehicle with (30) rounds of 7.62mm when the vehicle broke the plane of the 'no penetration line' 50m south of Post 7. The vehicle traveled an additional 15m toward post 7 before coming to a stop. . . .
- [Rules of Play](http://commonwonders.com/rules-of-play/) - It's been hard not to think about suicide lately -- the act of it, in isolation and, seemingly, incredible despair. The gay teenagers who killed themselves recently, in acts of private surrender, have made a collective public statement, but what is that statement . . . other than "something's wrong"? Whatever is wrong hits the
- [Then They Came for Me](http://commonwonders.com/then-they-came-for-me/) - Speaking out a year ago against the idea of holding civilian trials for terrorism suspects, Liz Cheney captured the paranoid arrogance of the past decade with stunning efficiency: "This demonstrates conclusively that we are going back to a pre-9/11 mentality," she said. Oh the horror! Fair trials, rule of law, habeas corpus, Miranda rights, blah, blah, blah -- remember what a nuisance our justice system used to be before Liz's father and the rest of the neocon High Nooniacs made us safe by hustling us off to a police state and perpetual war?
- [One -events](http://commonwonders.com/one-events/) - A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in
- [About Bob Koehler](http://commonwonders.com/one-authors/) - Achievements and awards are the stuff of bios, but what seems more important to me is the fact that my great-nephew, Joey, then 5 years old, tore across the entire length of his parents’ kitchen with a look of wild glee in his eyes to say goodbye to me; I waited for him in a crouch,
- [The Nazi Virus](http://commonwonders.com/the-nazi-virus/) - I call it the Nazi virus. Even as we were prosecuting Nazis at Nuremberg for their barbaric behavior, including their notorious medical experiments on death camp inmates, we were, it turns out, conducting our own medical experiments on a vulnerable and unsuspecting population: Between 1946 and 1948, medical researchers with the U.S. Public Health Service deliberately infected almost 700 Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to study the effects of penicillin on the diseases.
- [Drone Warfare on Trial](http://commonwonders.com/drone-warfare-on-trial/) - Drone warfare -- assassination by unmanned aircraft -- is arguably one of the most hellish spawns of the modern military-industrial era, and its use is becoming routine in the Af-Pak war, yet (what else is new?) there's no debate about it at the level of national policy, just a shrug and a void. The nation's future is itself on a sort of autopilot. It belongs to the market forces, in tandem with the reckless, short-term strategic interests of the Pentagon and the politics of empire. There's no moral voice at the core of this system -- not even, any longer, a voice of common sense. We live in a spectator democracy: Our role is to gape at the spectacle. The news cycle runs 24/7 and tells us nothing, if the act of "telling" includes in its meaning an invitation to participate.
- [Stoned on Righteousness](http://commonwonders.com/stoned-on-righteousness/) - It's not just about us. If Californians legalize marijuana on Nov. 2, maybe Mexico will end its horrific drug war. The "war on drugs," like the war on terror, is a simplistic and brutally stupid solution imposed on a complex, multifaceted human problem, born out of the notion that you can take evil out of context and eradicate it with the firepower of righteousness. Science and the arts have long ago moved on to new realms of awareness, but we're still playing politics the way we did in the 19th century -- or the 12th or 1st -- with the primary difference being that we have the capacity to do far more harm these days.
- [Holy War](http://commonwonders.com/holy-war/) - It took the U.S. secretary of defense, for God's sake, to get a Florida preacher to cancel his plans for pyrotechnic sacrilege on Sept. 11. A few days later, CNN asked some of its blog contributors to reflect on the incident... "now that the crisis is over." We're neck deep in two wars (excuse me, one and a half) and an imploding economy, not to mention global warming, endemic violence and hurricane season, but Terry Jones' creepy publicity stunt has the status of a national crisis: America's close call! We came this close to offending Muslims!
- [Implications of a Pointless War](http://commonwonders.com/implications-of-a-pointless-war/) - What does it mean that the New York Times, upon the occasion of President Obama's announced drawdown of forces in Iraq last week, called our seven and a half years of invasion and occupation of the country "a pointless war"? The editorial proceeded to do what Obama himself seemed to be under enormous political pressure to avoid: It skewered his predecessor, mildly perhaps, but repeatedly throughout the 645-word editorial: "the war made America less safe," "it is important not to forget how much damage Mr. Bush caused by misleading Americans," etc. The editorial even acknowledged an Iraqi death toll: "at least 100,000."
- [LARGE-SPIRITED AMERICA](http://commonwonders.com/large-spirited-america/) - “The holiest of all spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.” All along, Sept. 11 has cried out for words like this, for such a vision of global compassion. Instead, of course, we launched the 100 Years War, or whatever this goldmine for the war complex and the American empire now calls itself. And just as the war effort has started to flag (no pun intended), America is under attack again — from a proposed Muslim community center a few blocks from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. Let’s bomb Iran!
- [THE NEXT 500 YEARS](http://commonwonders.com/the-next-500-years/) - The participants in this unique dialogue may have been doing no less than opening the window on the next 500 years. As scary and stupefying as our world sometimes seems, we are at a place of enormous potential right now — a transition point of unprecedented understanding among cultures and peoples and worldviews. Pushing that understanding, creating, in the words of the late physicist David Bohm, a milieu of “participatory consciousness” among radically diverse thinkers, is the idea behind the Language of Spirit Conference, sponsored by the SEED Graduate Institute, which has been held in Albuquerque every year since 1999.
- [THE NEXT WAR](http://commonwonders.com/the-next-war/) - “I’m going to be killing people. I’m actually joining the Marines and will be doing this in real life.” War springs eternal. Compare the words of the 18-year-old boy quoted above by Philadelphia radio station WRTI, as he was wielding a pretend machinegun at a video-game parlor/Army recruiting center at a Philly shopping mall, with those of two neocons, Charles Robb and Charles Wald (retired senator and general, respectively), writing last month in the Washington Post: “We cannot afford to wait indefinitely to determine the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions. . . . Instead, the administration needs to expand its approach and make clear to the Iranian regime and the American people: If diplomatic and economic pressures do not compel Iran to terminate its nuclear program, the U.S. military has the capability and is prepared to launch an effective, targeted strike on Tehran’s nuclear and supporting military facilities.”
- [THE SUFFERING OF FALLUJAH](http://commonwonders.com/the-suffering-of-fallujah/) - Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah . . . And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them. Along with whatever else we did to Fallujah — exacted collective punishment on a defiant city (a war crime) in November 2004, killed thousands of civilians,
- [THE SECRECY STATE](http://commonwonders.com/the-secrecy-state/) - Under the I-hate-government, let’s-drown-it-in-the-bathtub administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the Secrecy State swelled to such enormous proportions it required more than a dozen investigative journalists from the Washington Post two years to fathom its size and shape. In our otherwise financially bankrupt society, where we can afford virtually nothing that actually helps people,
- [REVENGE OF THE WEEDS](http://commonwonders.com/revenge-of-the-weeds/) - Today’s big news stories — the wars, the eco-disasters — all seem to have the same gaping hole in them. This hole is lack of awareness, and its thrum, once you begin to hear it, soon becomes deafening: We can’t go on like this. We can’t keep playing conquering fool, arrogantly ordering the world to
- [THE WAR DRONES ON](http://commonwonders.com/the-war-drones-on/) - “Complaints about civilian casualties have also stirred concern among human rights advocates.” The problem is that a sentence like this — arguably a dead sentence, with a few quasi-facts entombed in an inert moral sensibility — parades as serious news. I mean, it’s lifted straight from the New York Times: from a story about drones,
- [RESTRAINING THE PROFIT ITCH](http://commonwonders.com/restraining-the-profit-itch/) - The gap between the diffuse human yearning for a decent world and the organized agenda of the corporatocracy has never, in my lifetime, been wider. I continue to be unable to turn away from the Gulf and what seems to be the unceremonious ushering in of a new age, a new awareness — or maybe
- [BEYOND PETROLEUM](http://commonwonders.com/beyond-petroleum/) - You couldn’t call it a dialogue. It was more like a momentary rip in the global power continuum, a spill of outrage on the stage of a major oil conference in London. On Tuesday, two Greenpeace activists interrupted a speech by British Petroleum chief of staff Steve Westwell — sandwiched him at his podium, trespassed
- [ANCIENT OCEANS](http://commonwonders.com/ancient-oceans/) - “Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins . . .” Now, along with endangered species, the Gulf spill has given us a new category: endangered oceans. The challenges presented by the disaster lay before us in their incomprehensible enormity. To what extent have the hundreds of thousands of gallons of the highly toxic
- [FIRST, DO NO HARM](http://commonwonders.com/first-do-no-harm/) - As Planet Earth continues to hemorrhage crude oil from its wound — with a worst-case estimate of as much as 100,000 barrels a day — we grope, beyond our anger and guilt, simply to imagine what damage we have done in the pursuit of human empowerment. This is bigger than BP, blameworthy though the company
- [DAVID’S SLINGSHOT](http://commonwonders.com/davids-slingshot/) - “All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.” — 1 Samuel 17:47 I’ve heard the Palestinians called “Hitler’s last victims.” That starts to get at the history of all
- [STOPPING ORWELL’S NIGHTMARE](http://commonwonders.com/stopping-orwells-nightmare/) - The God of War doesn’t dine on raw shank bone or bellow orders quite like he used to. When he talks to Congress, say, it goes more like this: “And, oh, while you’re up, I’m going to be needing, uh (cough, cough) . . . $159 billion this go-around, you know, for the troops. Thanks.”
- [DARK GREEN](http://commonwonders.com/dark-green/) - This is what happens sometimes when you play God: “Birds dropped from the air. The sky rained mud. And, as men from the rig struggled to save themselves from the aftermath of (the) explosion . . . the Gulf of Mexico itself caught on fire.” The Washington Post, covering a federal inquiry into the Deepwater
- [SWEET ATHENS](http://commonwonders.com/sweet-athens/) - “Sing it out, y’all!” Something happened in Athens, Ga., this past weekend. I can’t say exactly what, but I was there, I heard it, I felt it. At one point, I swear, the ’60s erupted out of the sweltering night, full blown, as a band called Abbey Road lit up College Avenue. What was happening
- [KEEPING FEAR ALIVE](http://commonwonders.com/keeping-fear-alive/) - “The stark truth is that one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history.” These words, from a recent essay by Dr. Helen Caldicott, are, you might say, my devotional text for the day. I sit with them reluctantly, of course. They trouble the soul more than anything else I can imagine. But it
- [JOURNEY OF A CITIZEN](http://commonwonders.com/journey-of-a-citizen/) - Too much awareness is a tough burden to carry. I got an email the other day from a reader who opened up the deep, confusing paradox of being a citizen of the American empire. “I read that 51 percent of our Federal taxes go to feed the war machine. The fear of the IRS overwhelms
- [Recovering from Empathy](http://commonwonders.com/recovering-from-empathy/) - What I thought of, straight off, as I watched that 17-minute WikiLeaks video of Iraqis — including a Reuters photographer and his driver — being strafed on a Baghdad street in 2007 by a U.S. helicopter, was a book of postcards published a decade ago. The book, compiled by James Allen, is called Without Sanctuary.
- [REFLECTIONS ON AN ANNIVERSARY](http://commonwonders.com/reflections-on-an-anniversary/) - “Everything feels obscene,” a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic, “used to it” way — outrage mixed, these last few years, with “hope,” smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence. Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a
- [THE GITMO DISTRACTION](http://commonwonders.com/the-gitmo-distraction/) - America’s charade of change comes complete with national “debate” and a slight readjustment of the center to accommodate the Bush Lite policies of the Obama presidency. What matters is that any change President Obama proposes be symbolic rather than substantive. A furious battle then ensues over the symbolic change so that, if it does finally
- [SCHOOLS IN ORANGE JUMPSUITS](http://commonwonders.com/schools-in-orange-jumpsuits/) - The image that flashed into my mind was: schools in orange jumpsuits. Something has broken apart in our society — an unspoken agreement about sanity, a truce between play and order. The authoritarian strain, always present, of course, has been ratcheting up to ever more absurd levels for a decade now. It’s as though, as
- [PARADISE LOST](http://commonwonders.com/paradise-lost/) - We owe the residents of the tiny island paradise called Vieques full compensation for the illnesses they are suffering courtesy of the U.S. Navy — and we owe them so much more than that. We owe them a full accounting of what was done to their island, about 10 miles off the coast of Puerto
- [THE PROGRESS OF MAN](http://commonwonders.com/the-progress-of-man/) - How much longer can we tolerate soulless progress? “Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.” John Prine was writing about his parents’ home
- [A PERSONAL STAKE IN SANITY](http://commonwonders.com/a-personal-stake-in-sanity/) - When we write about mass slaughter, even the good kind, which we call “war,” the waging of it should be on trial in every sentence. Anything less than that is propaganda, the chief characteristic of which is moral opacity. Sadly, this is how our news is delivered to us. Reading it makes me feel homeless.
- [REVERING OUR ROOTS](http://commonwonders.com/revering-our-roots/) - The recent death of a woman in her mid-80s named Boa Sr, the last speaker of a language said to date back 65,000 years, represents the breaking of an extraordinary link to the beginning of human speech, to a time when words were sacred incantations, direct evocations of reality: the equivalent of fire. Her death
- [A FESTIVAL OF PEACE](http://commonwonders.com/a-festival-of-peace/) - “I ran away from my foster mother, became homeless, lived on the street for three years. Because I was handicapped I couldn’t get into an apartment building to get out of the snow. Your skin feels like it’s on fire when you’re that cold. I’d stand in the doorway, where bright lights shine on the
- [THE SOURCE OF CORPORATE POWER](http://commonwonders.com/the-source-of-corporate-power/) - “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” The words are those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision marking some sort of culmination in the long corporate trek
- [Haiti: The Spectacle](http://commonwonders.com/haiti-the-spectacle/) - Haiti falls apart and America's journalists are on the ground, bringing us the spectacle of devastation. We care, we donate, we shake our heads in horror at the human toll of poverty. A bare foot sticks out of a pile of cinder blocks. "They've been digging for five hours," says Anderson Cooper. He sticks his
- [Disposable Gods](http://commonwonders.com/disposable-gods/) - Read the tabs — watch the tube — if you want to know how a society that has lost its religiosity can still engage with the deities. The eerily appropriate term “celebrity worship” is evidence of the extent to which we’ve improved on Greek culture: We’ve invented disposable gods. Tiger, Tiger . . . I
- [A Healthy Economy](http://commonwonders.com/a-healthy-economy/) - “This amendment starts from the premise that health care is a human right, and that every citizen, rich or poor, should have access to health care, just as every citizen has access to the fire department, the police or public schools.” And for a moment last week the fog of jargon and compromise lifted on
- [Apostle of Our Inner Genius](http://commonwonders.com/apostle-of-our-inner-genius/) - “Go home and write anything that comes to your mind. Don’t stop. Write for ten minutes or till you’ve filled a whole page.” Ken Macrorie said this just in time, as far as I’m concerned. The date was May 5, 1964. I was still in high school, a month shy of graduation. That fall I’d
- [The School-to-Prison Pipeline](http://commonwonders.com/the-school-to-prison-pipeline/) - I hope the Dignity in Schools Campaign overflows its banks, spilling awareness into every corner of the country. “Millions of children and youth are denied educational opportunities in the United States,” begins the National Resolution for Ending School Pushout, which some 200 organizations in 43 states have so far signed. “This injustice results from systemic
- [Caring and Killing](http://commonwonders.com/caring-and-killing/) - Dear Barack . . . Mr. President . . . brilliant, courageous (I once thought) guy I voted for: You’re great. I mean the way you put words together. As I listened to you on Tuesday night, I thought about the interlocking, dovetail-joint perfection of your language: the crisp-edged certainty of your delivery, the clean
- [Call it Ecocide](http://commonwonders.com/call-it-ecocide/) - In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children. This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects
- [Hell Comes Home](http://commonwonders.com/hell-comes-home/) - There’s no armor, it turns out, for conscience. So our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in their heads, used up, greeted only by the military’s own meat grinder of inadequate health care and intolerance for “weakness.” “Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve never seen
- [Isolated Incident](http://commonwonders.com/isolated-incident/) - Moving forward from the latest massacre, three narratives — well, one of them is no more than the familiar, all-purpose shrug of experts, puzzled over yet another “isolated incident” — are vying to explain what happened and set the direction of our future. Is Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged killer of 13 people at
- [The Twin Brother of Annihilation](http://commonwonders.com/the-twin-brother-of-annihilation/) - “As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we’ll be all right.” Pastoral rhetoric? This, from a writer who later refers to a “nuclear umbrella”? The words are those of David Von Drehle, an editor at large for Time Magazine, who couldn’t resist a faint note of mocking arrogance as he
- [Accepting the Prize](http://commonwonders.com/accepting-the-prize/) - I may be wrong, but I think Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because the selection committee was feeling as soul sick as I do at the ebbing of humanity’s great opportunity to corral global militarism and fundamentally reprioritize. Obama’s election last year rode on global aspirations for — at the very least
- [Reviving the Peace Dividend](http://commonwonders.com/reviving-the-peace-dividend/) - World leaders can’t seem to hold an economic summit without security forces at the level of an occupying army running roughshod over the host city. This is both a symptom of what’s wrong with our global economy — predicated on war, domination and scarcity — and a metaphor for how it works. So as delegates
- [Mission of Ignorance](http://commonwonders.com/mission-of-ignorance/) - Right up there with “our mission,” in the pantheon of sacred foreign policy mumbo-jumbo, is “training Afghan security forces,” that endless, multibillion-dollar prerequisite for our departure from the country. We’ve been training a local army and police force for eight years now to take on the good and noble task of defending U.S. interests. Yet:
- [The Tossed Shoe Award](http://commonwonders.com/the-tossed-shoe-award/) - “Businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its right to exist.” Do Adam Smith’s famously forgotten words of caution for capitalists apply to journalism? Is
- [Serious Citizenship](http://commonwonders.com/serious-citizenship/) - “Most of the time, we are grievously feeling that we’re not getting anywhere and that in the ongoing Afghan tragedy, ‘peace’ or ‘humanity’ is a rather impractical, ridiculous thought. But there’s a remnant of the human spirit left in the Afghan smile and that helps to keep me going.” — Hakim, a humanitarian aid worker
- [Winners Lose](http://commonwonders.com/winners-lose/) - The situation in Afghanistan is serious. We’re getting “out-governed” by an enemy so ruthless it’s bringing services to a desperate people ignored by the legitimate government we installed. But our eight-year quagmire . . . excuse me, war . . . can still be won, says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander
- [The Scapegoat’s Apology](http://commonwonders.com/the-scapegoats-apology/) - I don’t begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I’m hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it. If you steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more defenseless people, something of a higher magnitude
- [Guns That Talk](http://commonwonders.com/guns-that-talk/) - It’s like truth or dare. And it’s legal. Get your permit or whatever and you, too, can bring an assault rifle to the next presidential speech you attend. There’s nothing the police can do — amazing! If only the Democrats, back when George Bush was president, had known there was a safe, legal way to
- [Cheap Frames](http://commonwonders.com/cheap-frames/) - Before I know it I’m sucked into the New York Times story and I haven’t had my Prozac or anything. Through the miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story’s point has been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait
- [The Homeless Angel](http://commonwonders.com/the-homeless-angel/) - “Just as craving crystallizes into anguish, so does understanding flower into letting go.” — Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs I walk into the new CVS pharmacy in my neighborhood to buy a birthday card and the first thing that happens is the beeper goes off. At the same time, a female robo-voice says, with eerie
- [The Heart of the Future](http://commonwonders.com/the-heart-of-the-future/) - Last week’s announcement from Moscow, of a new treaty between the U.S. and Russia to begin cutting their nuclear stockpiles by a quarter to a third, is indeed “modest” and perhaps downright “disappointing” in its tentativeness, as critics have pointed out. Even so, the heart of the future beats here. To cobble such an accord
- [War By Other Means](http://commonwonders.com/war-by-other-means/) - We live in a world where arrogance and power are concentrated to an unbelievably fine point, while responsibility is diffused into a global mist. A few fanatics can plot and wage a war, stirring up consequences infinitely beyond what they are capable of imagining, then retire, when things go bad, into a luxury tinged with
- [‘W’ is for Withdrawal](http://commonwonders.com/w-is-for-withdrawal/) - “From now on, the war they started is ours.” Seemingly these words of an Iraqi soldier, noted in a Guardian U.K. story, were uttered in pride. This was on June 30: National Sovereignty Day, the day U.S. troops withdrew from Iraqi cities. Sorry, but it sounds more like someone enthusing over a case of venereal
- [The Iron Triangle](http://commonwonders.com/the-iron-triangle/) - When I read about the Defense Department’s plans for my future security, why do I feel so insecure? The New York Times privileged us the other day with another dispatch from what we used to call — back in my days as a toiler in the journalistic trenches of Chicago’s teeming neighborhoods — the Iron
- [Democracy’s Paradox](http://commonwonders.com/democracys-paradox/) - Wanna hear a good Holocaust joke? Or a rib-tickler about lynching? How about starving Ethiopians? You’ll bust a gut. I spent an eerie couple of hours recently on the wrong side of the sicko line, checking out hate sites and hate jokes. What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead
- [Justice for the Privileged](http://commonwonders.com/justice-for-the-privileged/) - Take empathy out of the concept of justice and what you have left are rules: simple, mechanical, lifeless. “Are we really going to insist,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn asked the other day, after President Obama talked about closing down the Guantanamo detention facility, “that the jihadist with a suitcase nuke captured in Times Square be
- [See No Evil](http://commonwonders.com/see-no-evil/) - The heavily armed, trained killer was “under stress” when he raped, then murdered a 14-year-old girl and tried to burn her body, after having murdered her parents and 7-year-old sister. “He’s my Steve. You can’t stop loving someone.” Here are the two poles of our existence, the human condition stretched between them, as taut as
- [Peace Rising](http://commonwonders.com/peace-rising/) - In sacred remembrance of all those we have killed, and are continuing to kill . . . The flag waves, the heart stirs, the music rends the air. Memorial Day 2009. I stood at a bubbling fountain in downtown Chicago and listened to speakers from Vietnam Veterans Against the War — speakers with hard-earned and
- [Never Again](http://commonwonders.com/never-again/) - The reason we must keep the torture issue alive is not to exact a small measure of comeuppance from the Bush administration zealots who bent the law till it screamed, but to alter the course of history. Thus the filing of disciplinary complaints a few days ago against 12 Bush administration lawyers, who crafted the
- [Goliath’s Vulnerability is the Truth](http://commonwonders.com/goliaths-vulnerability-is-the-truth/) - The desperation of our military efforts is showing around the edges of the carnage and tragedy. This past week has brought three official U.S. denials that we have done what eyewitnesses and/or other evidence indicates we did: a) used white phosphorous as a weapon against Afghan civilians; b) killed nearly 150 Afghan villagers in a
- [The Hounds of Heaven](http://commonwonders.com/the-hounds-of-heaven/) - “The special forces guys — they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom.” It’s worse than you think. Torture, religion, democracy, God. They’re all part of the
- [Torture and Treason](http://commonwonders.com/torture-and-treason/) - None dare call it . . . what is that word again? It’s a word I associate with the McCarthy era and patriotic fanaticism; its commission is the cardinal sin against the nation-state and, as such, not only too easily flung at an ideological opponent but a frayed, simplistic concept, in that humankind ought to
- [Wall of Fear](http://commonwonders.com/wall-of-fear/) - “Frankly, this does look a lot like Jimmy Carter. Carter tried weakness, and the world got tougher and tougher, because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators — when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead.” The chicken hawks still have a mega-forum. This was Newt Gingrich the other day, discussing “the handshake”
- [War As Entertainment](http://commonwonders.com/war-as-entertainment/) - OMG, pirates! Headlines around the country squealed with glee as our Navy SEALS — the Easter SEALS — took out the Somalian baddies, freed the newest American hero and helped President Obama with the “dodging of a PR bullet,” as USA Today put it. Meanwhile, “Pirates around the Indian Ocean vowed revenge,” the New York
- [Geo-Insanity’s Latest Mutation](http://commonwonders.com/geo-insanitys-latest-mutation/) - As our warrior robot drones eradicate evil — or at least “militancy” — from above, the Suicide Army of the East vows to keep blowing itself up until we call them off. This is not the plot of a bad sci-fi thriller. It’s page one of the New York Times, described, as ever, with a
- [Saving Obama](http://commonwonders.com/saving-obama/) - “Now, I’d like to speak clearly and candidly to the American people . . .” I believe him, with a passionate urgency — this new president, swept into office on a surge of hope and anger. I believe him without cynicism. After all, he has a terrifying job to do, a toxic legacy left to
- [Gold for Humanity](http://commonwonders.com/gold-for-humanity/) - When exactly did it happen — that “blinding flash of the obvious”? It may have been during lunch — outside, in a park in the nation’s capital on a beautiful, cherry-blossom afternoon — as public health theorist Ari Cowan held forth about working with maximum security prisoners in Washington state. Having described a program that
- [A Modest Proposal](http://commonwonders.com/a-modest-proposal/) - “But administration officials also worry that taking too hard a line with AIG and other companies could discourage top financial experts and institutions from joining the government efforts to fix the financial system.” — Weisman, Reddy and Pleven, Wall Street Journal “AIG built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows
- [Reversing the Cycle of Violence](http://commonwonders.com/reversing-the-cycle-of-violence/) - So much experience in the room, so much wisdom, so much . . . concentrated hope. Poke at it slightly and the truth comes out, in brief, quick anecdotes: Two neighbors were at bitter loggerheads over a barking dog. After all communication broke off, they eventually found themselves in mediation. One of the parties was
- [Kids for Cash](http://commonwonders.com/kids-for-cash/) - A number of bad ideas and virulent trends in American life converge, it seems to me, in the unfolding scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., known as “kids for cash.” The blurring of the line that separates profit from state, especially since the Reagan era, has had a far more devastating effect on American values — indeed,
- [Cross of Irony](http://commonwonders.com/cross-of-irony/) - “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. . . . Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.
- [Truth and Healing](http://commonwonders.com/truth-and-healing-2/) - Can we find ideas — political ideas — big enough to be worthy of this moment? You know, before the cynicism and the disappointment and the recession and the dumbed-down media and, oh yeah, the regrouping Republicans, conspire to dull Barack Obama’s election into the bitter memory of hope and harass his presidency into something
- [Keeping the Bush Era Viable](http://commonwonders.com/keeping-the-bush-era-viable/) - Rest assured, there are powerful interests that will not put up with an Obama presidency if it’s about even half the changes it threatens — I mean, promises — to make. Watch them circle, yipping at his integrity. “Obama’s moralizing tone may not wear well,” a Wall Street Journal headline archly surmised a few days
- [The Human Franchise](http://commonwonders.com/the-human-franchise/) - It was the young woman’s desolate face — her mug shot — that pulled me into the story. Now that is a pretty mug shot . . . lol. Burn baby Burn! I touch the edges of this story, this tragedy, gingerly, wishing, oh Lord, that I were in more certain territory. A 22-year-old woman
- [Childish Things](http://commonwonders.com/childish-things/) - No matter how much celebrity they try to infuse him with, Barack Obama remains, somehow, as unassuming — so it appears — as that picture of him, which made the rounds on the Internet a few months ago, wiping his own table at a fast-food restaurant. Is it all a dream? Has “change” really come
- [The Moral Dead Zone](http://commonwonders.com/the-moral-dead-zone/) - “Mr. Ban said too many people had died and there had been too much civilian suffering.” That almost bears repeating, but I won’t because I don’t believe it. Too many? In the moral dead zone of the human heart, perennially justified as “war” (evoking honor, triumph, glory), there’s no such thing as too much suffering.
- [Be the Peace](http://commonwonders.com/be-the-peace/) - “Surely, they say, there must, there has to be another way of doing this.” OK, let’s start here, with this flicker of anguish, this quick stab of despair and disbelief that war is a rational means to an end. These words, from an essay by Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the Jewish peace lobbying group
- [The Future of Civilization](http://commonwonders.com/the-future-of-civilization/) - The tight, absurd parameters of “peace,” as they are drawn by the military model we continue to believe in, make real peace —neither bitter nor temporary — impossible even to imagine. God save us, for instance, from New York Times editorials, which inflict as much damage on civilians as F-16s. “Israel must defend itself,” the
- [A NEW WAY OF BEING ON THIS PLANET](http://commonwonders.com/a-new-way-of-being-on-this-planet/) - “The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years.” Barack Obama was elected — not just elected, cheered wildly into the U.S. presidency by a nervous planet — because a lot of people, perhaps the majority of us, in one
- [Dark Prayer](http://commonwonders.com/dark-prayer/) - The water churned and pushed against the ice with a dark seriousness that reminded me of prayer. Subzero Chicago night at the edge of the year, the edge of change, the edge of what’s bearable. I stood on an old breakwater, a long, crumbling construction of concrete and steel that jutted into Lake Michigan —
- [The Pacifier Tree](http://commonwonders.com/the-pacifier-tree/) - “Dad, did you know the governor of Illinois was arrested?” Well, no. This was last week. I was in Denmark, visiting my daughter, and this was my first news from Crazy Land in a while. It’s dangerous to go online when I’m traveling. I learned, among other things, that my governor, Rod Blagojevich, was taped
- [Redefining “Realism”](http://commonwonders.com/redefining-realism/) - The war regroups. What if Barack Obama, as he pursues his pragmatic strategy that so far seems to be 10 parts “reassurance” (to the defense and financial establishment) to one part “change,” is really finished with his anti-war base for the next four years? I don’t know if this is true, but his early moves
- [The Ghosts of Desert Storm](http://commonwonders.com/the-ghosts-of-desert-storm/) - Seventeen years and three wars later, the ghosts of Operation Desert Storm — the cancers, the chronic headaches and dizziness, the fibromyalgia, the ALS and so much more that have stalked returning vets, whose medical claims have been denied, ignored, relegated to the paper shredder — have just gotten a reality upgrade. “The extensive body
- [History is Screaming](http://commonwonders.com/history-is-screaming/) - Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as
- [Hope and Vision](http://commonwonders.com/hope-and-vision/) - I hope it’s time, if nothing else, to retire cynical bumper stickers, such as: If elections could change anything, they’d be illegal. The air remains thick with a sense of history and change, if not mandate. People are still buying last Wednesday’s newspaper, as though to prolong a moment that has already passed. But we
- [Our Fragile Dream](http://commonwonders.com/our-fragile-dream/) - It had already been a long day for me, and for the country, when I rode the train downtown to Grant Park on the night of Nov. 4. History was crowding against my thoughts — my car was full of joyful, youthful, rock-the-vote noise — as I looked out the window into the Chicago night
- [The Time Has Come](http://commonwonders.com/the-time-has-come/) - President-elect Obama . . . I’m daring my own heart to write these words, to let hope’s preview ignite me for an instant. Despite all my reservations (Afghanistan) and all my fears (how will they try to undermine his presidency, or prevent it by theft?), I can’t help but feel history pushing at me and
- [Redesigning Democracy](http://commonwonders.com/redesigning-democracy/) - Two seconds of radio news was enough -- suddenly the 2008 presidential campaign collapsed around me in an unrecognizable heap of consumer politics as I ate breakfast. "Redistribution of the wealth," John the Candidate was saying. "That's one of the tenets of . . . socialism." This was maybe the ten thousandth time I'd been
- [Our National Juncture](http://commonwonders.com/our-national-juncture/) - Here’s the difference between vote fraud, which is real, and voter fraud, which, though almost nonexistent, has instantly gripped the popular imagination: The former is a complex, internal problem of democracy, the acknowledgment of which requires us to face our national contradictions and inner demons, and, applying informed intelligence, demand changes in our system so
- [Brace Yourself](http://commonwonders.com/brace-yourself/) - Call it, what, our crapshoot democracy? The looming election — the process itself, not merely the feints and jabs of the candidates — is actually getting some mainstream media attention, as in, ahem, voting public, excuse me, but maybe you should be aware that irresponsible self-interest has been detected in the vicinity of our polling
- [The War to Promote Terror](http://commonwonders.com/the-war-to-promote-terror/) - The “necessary war” in Afghanistan, which both presidential candidates support — the one, you know, that’s really about terrorists and Osama and all — raises as many troubling questions about who we are as the other war we’re fighting and losing. Consider the details of this war. The aggregate civilian death toll, at the hands
- [The Deep Cry for Integrity](http://commonwonders.com/the-deep-cry-for-integrity/) - How about we tack a values shift onto the $700 billion economic bailout package the Bush administration is asking for? Hello, 2008? This is 1929 calling. What’s still missing in too many venues of official concern is the big, national aha! We can’t solve our problems, as Einstein said, at the level of thinking at
- [Goo-Goo America](http://commonwonders.com/goo-goo-america/) - Say you’ve got a global agenda that’s far too important to leave to chance — wars to fight, quagmires to feed, interests to protect, secrets to hide. Staying in power is crucial. This presents a big problem in an election year — heart-stopping, even — for the Republican Party. Consider the basic numbers, as compiled
- [An Embedded Prayer](http://commonwonders.com/an-embedded-prayer/) - The outrage and grief push against the edge of language: “A visitor to the village and to three graveyards within its limits on Aug. 31 counted 42 freshly dug graves,” writes New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall. “Thirteen of the graves were so small they could hold only children.” Here’s my standard for presidential fiber:
- [Logical Consequences](http://commonwonders.com/logical-consequences/) - Call it creative self-destruction, maybe. How surreal it’s been this week to watch the Republicans reap a small portion of the divine comeuppance due them, first from a hurricane, then from a pregnant teen-ager. Surely more of the same is on its way, but no one wins, because what is lying in a shambles around
- [State of Denial](http://commonwonders.com/state-of-denial/) - Talk about naive. The Union of Concerned Scientists apparently thought the Democratic and Republican national conventions would be appropriate events at which to bring up the awkwardly substantive topic of U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles (6,000 or so) and policy (insane). So, as part of a larger campaign of informative ads in the two convention cities,
- [Predator and Prey](http://commonwonders.com/predator-and-prey/) - Bad bear! Within the false outrage coursing through much of mainstream politics and the media, there is a grudging reverence for the brutality of the latest world crisis, if evinced only in the satisfaction that America has found its next enemy. Cold War sentiments stir in their hibernation, the McCain campaign has a bete noir
- [Civilian Diplomacy](http://commonwonders.com/civilian-diplomacy/) - Peace is no more — and no less — than the audacity of sanity, reaching past the dubious geopolitics of national self-interest and standing, as Hank Brusselback did, underneath the ancient bridge in Esfahan, Iran, listening to the men who had gathered to sing. It’s called civilian diplomacy, and it is one way we will
- [No Name for the River](http://commonwonders.com/no-name-for-the-river/) - What astounds me about the “race card” — which either did or didn’t get played in the presidential race recently — is its thinness. Racial politics, and racism itself, used to be a way of life, as pervasive as hatred, as far-reaching as ignorance. Large institutions were devoted to it, politicians reveled in it, history
- [Citizens of the World](http://commonwonders.com/citizens-of-the-world/) - What a surprising burst of hope I felt, looking at the photo in the newspaper the next day: Barack Obama stands before 200,000 Berliners and addresses them as a “fellow citizen of the world.” It may be premature, but I’m announcing it anyway: We’ve repealed the Bush Doctrine. There’s no turning back. Hope has the
- [The Next New Yorker Cover](http://commonwonders.com/the-next-new-yorker-cover/) - Since I’m usually one of the last people in the country to get my copy of the New Yorker (well, it sure seems like it), I’m aware of any excitement or controversy the new issue has generated long before the magazine actually lands in my mailbox. So I was hardly shocked at the cover of
- [Stigmatizing War](http://commonwonders.com/stigmatizing-war/) - The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join. You may have missed the news: At the end of May, 111 nations, including, at the last minute, Great Britain, showing the world the power of an unleashed conscience, agreed to an international ban on cluster bombs, surely
- [Steel Rain](http://commonwonders.com/steel-rain/) - “Civilian casualties have been a continuing issue in Afghanistan, and President Karzai has rebuked American and NATO forces for what he has called carelessness in their military operations.” This is the genteel, bloodless language of geopolitics, spoken by the Gray Lady and the heads of state and makers of policy whom she serves. You wouldn’t
- [Words and Bullets](http://commonwonders.com/words-and-bullets/) - The “debate” about guns has clogged up the dialogue about a safe society, and I’m wondering what we can do about that. Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which overturned Washington, D.C.’s gun ban and reinterpreted the tortuously worded Second Amendment — “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
- [An Urgency of Joy](http://commonwonders.com/an-urgency-of-joy/) - The culture of war goes quietly about its business. Last week, Congress fed it another $162 billion, perhaps with some nostalgia: This was the final war-funding request of the Bush administration, the lame-duck, despised status of which making absolutely no difference in the dispatch with which the money was delivered. Yes, there was some protest
- [The Shadow Platform](http://commonwonders.com/the-shadow-platform/) - Lies are sticky critters, often advancing complex, covert agendas that are essentially denial-resistant. That’s why the new Web site launched by the Obama campaign — fightthesmears.com — to counter the rumors and absurdities about the candidate and his wife that have proliferated in this election season (surprise, surprise), while it may be necessary, is hardly
- [Be the Media](http://commonwonders.com/be-the-media/) - Camera, lights, mike-in-the-face. Hey Bill Moyers, what are you doing at a left-wing, partisan media conference? That was how Fox News producer Porter Barry tried to ambush television’s most venerable voice of sanity this past weekend, after Moyers spoke eloquently — “Journalism can only exist in a vibrant, democratic culture” — at the fourth annual
- [Now What?](http://commonwonders.com/now-what/) - Funny how we can’t seem to hear the truth until it’s uttered by a professional liar. Thus Scott McClellan, who was George Bush’s press secretary for three years, beginning shortly after we invaded Iraq — the very Scott McClellan who personified lock-step obedience to the cause — has acquired sudden street cred as Someone To
- [The Flip Side of Glory](http://commonwonders.com/the-flip-side-of-glory/) - An American soldier’s sexual assault of a 14-year-old Okinawan girl has caused a diplomatic crisis that could result in Japan’s refusal to increase its participation in the Iraq war, creating a rare situation indeed: an instance in which rape matters to the U.S. military. President Bush apologized. Condi Rice even told Japanese leaders that the
- [The Politics of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/the-politics-of-peace/) - So we blink, take a breath, stare once more at the vote total: 149 nay, 141 yea. War funding request denied! This is a first, fleeting and fluky though it may be. Look quickly and imagine a Congress that doesn’t feed the war god every time it pounds the table. Look quickly and imagine what
- [The Penta-Pundits](http://commonwonders.com/the-penta-pundits/) - Well, why shouldn’t the Pentagon put its four-stars on the tube to ladle out patriotic talking points to the American public like mess hall stew? There’s a straightforward quasi-honesty to government-managed news, which only has a weird feel because the Penta-pundits had to pose as impartial analysts and play along with the image the networks
- [Apology Denied](http://commonwonders.com/apology-denied/) - “I want you to feel that Iraqi life is precious,” he told them. Well, that’s not going to happen. Here, at the level of basic humanity, the occupation of Iraq — indeed, the entire Bush administration — begins to unravel. We can see this with excruciating clarity as requests for an apology waylay the smooth,
- [Shattering the War Consensus](http://commonwonders.com/shattering-the-war-consensus/) - Why, for God’s sake, does nothing change? The war goes on, the money flows, the blood flows, the lies stay exactly the same. Have you noticed? Have you ever wondered, with a stab of transcendent confusion, why a self-correcting rationality hasn’t kicked in by now, why a saner awareness hasn’t made itself evident in the
- [The Done Deal](http://commonwonders.com/the-done-deal/) - If politics is the art of saying nothing, then Barack Obama is sure blowing it, isn’t he? His latest “gaffe,” to proclaim at a private fundraiser in San Francisco (of all places) that small-town Americans are bitter and cling to guns and God in lieu of financial security — these words purveyed to the American
- [Truth’s Wreckage](http://commonwonders.com/truths-wreckage/) - The interests of war, which siphon off 40 percent of every dollar we pay in taxes, have no choice but to declare peace — or at least truth — anti-American, because the blood myth of national exceptionalism, and the perpetual insecurity it creates, is all they’ve got. It’s also all they need. Did anyone, for
- [Fire and Race](http://commonwonders.com/fire-and-race/) - What could be more brittle than “Americanism”? What could be more tedious than the mass defense of the teary-eyed, ahistorical ignorance for which it stands? We are still in the toddler stage of national awareness, apparently, too young to be told how we got here. Thus the fiery Rev. Jeremiah Wright, proclaiming the bitter truths
- [Keep the Republic](http://commonwonders.com/keep-the-republic/) - The ground feels a little soft, but we’re going to stand it. Premise one: Having a fair election — all votes counted, all who are eligible and want to vote allowed to vote — is far, far more important, even in 2008, than who wins. Premise two: Fair elections are not a given. They never
- [Where War Meets Peace](http://commonwonders.com/where-war-meets-peace/) - “I trained my weapon on him,” Kristopher Goldsmith said. It was a little boy, 6 years old maybe, standing on a roof, menacing the soldiers with a stick. “I was thinking, I hate these Iraqis who throw rocks. I could kill this kid.” OK, America, let’s look through the sights of Goldsmith’s rifle for a
- [The Fear Fundamentalists](http://commonwonders.com/the-fear-fundamentalists-2/) - It’s 3 a.m. and your child is sleeping. A detainee groans at Guantanamo. On the campaign trail, the Clinton PR team is guzzling coffee, dreaming up new ways to milk votes out of fear. Why, I wondered, is she going after these votes in the primary? Surely she doesn’t imagine that the fear fundamentalists are
- [Losing the Future](http://commonwonders.com/losing-the-future/) - A certain reverence is required just to approach the book’s title: “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” by noted economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. I can see why they understated it. The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton.
- [The State Religion](http://commonwonders.com/the-state-religion/) - Grab your flak jackets because there’s “trench warfare” on the campaign trail, as would-be commanders-in-chief prove their mettle not merely by persuading people to vote for them but by “demolishing” their opponents — because the leader of a country as powerful as the United States of America must, above all, be someone who’s tough and
- [The Hillary Nutcracker](http://commonwonders.com/the-hillary-nutcracker/) - Oh, come on, do we need this? I know, I know, it’s cute. STAINLESS STEEL THIGHS! FEEL THE SQUEEZE! Perhaps the fact that a major party is about to nominate either a female or an African-American male to be president of the United States is so lacking in controversy, so quietly ho-hum, that a little
- [Snow and Miracles](http://commonwonders.com/snow-and-miracles/) - The snowmobilers stopped and talked to the truck driver who’d been sitting behind me for the past eight hours, then they sped off and I watched as his truck came back to life, the headlights suddenly filling my car, the engine revving. I could scarcely believe that the ordeal was ending. “People usually consider walking
- [Defeat Without End](http://commonwonders.com/defeat-without-end/) - “Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching . . .” There it is again, that choking lie, so smoothly administered — with just enough fear to help America gag down all that righteousness. President Bush told it
- [Conspiracy Theorist](http://commonwonders.com/conspiracy-theorist/) - “We should at least get votes back on paper and get people counting them by hand.” As innocuous as these words may sound, they make me feel like I’m on I-35 in Minneapolis, headed toward the Mississippi bridge. Ankle-deep in a presidential election year, I find myself without faith in the infrastructure of American civilization.
- [The Eternal Underdog](http://commonwonders.com/the-eternal-underdog/) - “I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s none other than “the Filipino Monkey,” now doing voiceovers for the Pentagon! More bad melodrama in the Gulf, I’m afraid. And war with Iran is still a no-go, but the bellicose among us keep trying. It’s nothing new. The
- [Primary Concerns](http://commonwonders.com/primary-concerns/) - As the breathless sports coverage of the presidential primaries bursts around me this morning, I’m doing my best to resist surrendering to the contrived drama about “comeback kids” and the flying shrapnel of numbers and hold onto my troubled skepticism about the electoral process, or at least most of it. First of all, before we
- [Pseudo-Reporting](http://commonwonders.com/pseudo-reporting/) - Many U.S. media outlets were quick to give us a primer on Islamic terrorism in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last week, even though actual evidence points the finger far more at our ally in the war on terror, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, than it does at the Taliban or al-Qaida. Indeed, McClatchy Newspapers
- [Tinsel and Values](http://commonwonders.com/tinsel-and-values/) - Whereas there are approximately 300 million apple pie lovers in the United States, making apple pie the dessert of choice of 99 percent of the American population; Whereas the holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa) is a festive occasion in which pigging out is not only permissible but de rigueur, and no pie (with the possible
- [Crooked Timber](http://commonwonders.com/crooked-timber/) - America’s suicide bombers don’t use bombs and don’t seem to have a cause larger than their own angst, but they’re as lethal as any misguided political fanatic and they beg a question as urgent as any the human race has faced. Yet it’s the same old — indeed, Paleolithic — question we’ve always faced. Are
- [Iraq’s Million](http://commonwonders.com/iraqs-million/) - In the Fantasy Middle East, the troop surge is helping plucky Iraq get its act together; and Iran, as serious a threat as ever and still lusting to start World War III, awaits liberation by the superpower known as “Johnny Democracy.” In the reality version, our legacy is bad water, cancer and social chaos. Iraq
- [Trial by Fire Hose](http://commonwonders.com/trial-by-fire-hose/) - “This is America, get used to it.” A generation ago — well, two, perhaps — such a comment, surfacing with malicious anonymity at a Deep South high school, along with Confederate flags, swastikas and scrawled references to “white power,” would have been meant as friendly advice to uppity integrationists and racial harmony types to shut
- [The Devalued Currency of Truth](http://commonwonders.com/the-devalued-currency-of-truth/) - “I asked Sgt. Gaskins about his hopes for the future. He replied that he has no future.” — psychotherapist Rosemary Masters This is the cost of our wars, and sooner or later we need to begin paying down the debt. But it is only payable in the devalued currency of the truth. For now, Soldier,
- [Baghdad in Middle America](http://commonwonders.com/baghdad-in-middle-america/) - Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it. The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom
- [Used Razor Blades](http://commonwonders.com/used-razor-blades/) - Hidden agendas unfold and a sinister veep whips fear into a froth one more time: “Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” The words he never adds, though many Americans, I imagine, silently do
- [Crash Course in Empathy](http://commonwonders.com/crash-course-in-empathy/) - “They will be longed for always,” the Web site said, and I believe it, imagining the hole in the lives of those who loved the three men Jeanette Sliwinski killed. I also hear the unbearable sorrow in these words from a newspaper account: “From her jail hospital bed, Sliwinski has begged for forgiveness.” Between these
- [A Nation Downwind](http://commonwonders.com/a-nation-downwind/) - “Please, dear God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.” — unidentified government official, 1980 Mary Dickson’s new play, “Exposed,” is a sacrament of grief and anger that doesn’t stop at the edge of the stage or end with the actors’ bows. Be careful. It gets under the skin and into the marrow, but that’s
- [Pre-Existing Conditions](http://commonwonders.com/pre-existing-conditions/) - Deep in the heart of the postwar hell that awaits many injured and emotionally shattered vets lies a memo so toxic with cynical irony it deserves to be posted on americasarmy.com, the U.S. Army’s official teen-entrapment Web site. “We can’t fix every Soldier. We have to hold Soldiers accountable for their behavior. Everyone in life
- [An Adolescent Choice](http://commonwonders.com/an-adolescent-choice/) - The details quicken the pulse and keep the crime alive. Two teenage girls walking home on a June night in 1993 in Houston happen into a pack of drunk young men; they’re gang-raped, beaten, dragged to the woods and strangled — one with her own shoelace, one with a belt and, when she doesn’t quickly
- [The American Id](http://commonwonders.com/the-american-id/) - I don’t know how many people read the Sun, but my guess is that even if its circulation stats aren’t greater than, oh, Foreign Affairs, let us say, or The New Yorker, its position in the American consciousness is more central simply by virtue of its commanding niche on convenience-store and drugstore news racks from
- [This Hallowed Landmark](http://commonwonders.com/this-hallowed-landmark/) - The New York Daily News, with its long tradition of lurid and stupid headlines, outdid itself in its special welcome for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, warning him: “If you even think of setting foot near Ground Zero, you can GO TO HELL!” The accompanying editorial was one of the ripest specimens of yellow
- [Sanity in Tiny Nibbles](http://commonwonders.com/sanity-in-tiny-nibbles/) - The abyss between “crime against humanity” and “we’ll have to look into this” may be all but unfathomable — deep as a mass grave — but sometimes we have to trust the process. I fear that democratic progress is a mouse’s progress: justice — sanity — in tiny nibbles. This past Sept. 11, Illinois Gov.
- [Martin’s World](http://commonwonders.com/martins-world/) - “By then I had pulled Martin into my lap. Martin had let go of his bowels, was gurgling and losing consciousness. We were both completely soaked and covered with blood, and I was sitting in a puddle of blood and body fluids. I quickly realized I needed to stop screaming and crying because it would
- [The Prerequisite for Salvation](http://commonwonders.com/the-prerequisite-for-salvation/) - The poster exploits the howling demons of our culture. It’s my morning smack-in-the-eye, bright gold, four feet high, dominated by a female in stark silhouette striding resolutely into the wreckage of post-apocalypse Las Vegas. She wields a wicked-looking blaster in each hand. The ad, for the movie “Resident Evil: Extinction,” occupies the spot on the
- [Presence of Mind](http://commonwonders.com/presence-of-mind/) - “I knew the situation was serious. I was shaking all over. But I was amazed by the complexity of my mind — the most clear part was just the speed and agility of my mind. I immediately began talking to him in a calm voice and engaged in eye contact. But he was not in
- [The Nanny State](http://commonwonders.com/the-nanny-state/) - The “ahhh” of familiar pleasure I felt as I accelerated cut off abruptly as I watched the gas-mileage readout on my sister’s new Camry plummet. How dare the requirements of fuel-efficient driving presume to contradict the habits — and unacknowledged godlike joys — of a lifetime of gasoline consumption? I looked at my sister, a
- [Creative Destruction](http://commonwonders.com/creative-destruction/) - Heckuva job, fellas! The monster called Iraq that the Bush administration has bequeathed humanity was created with a breath-sucking mix of high-tech ruthlessness, messianic ideology and sheer, FEMA-quality incompetence — and, it turns out, a little help from the Italian Mafia. I hope what has happened these last four years — this abominable exercise in
- [Disciples of Yossarian](http://commonwonders.com/disciples-of-yossarian/) - Following on the heels of his flirtation with violent “decisiveness” toward Pakistan, Barack Obama got twisted up even further in the conflicting loyalties that complicate the lives of Democratic presidential candidates and the people who vote for them. Pretty soon the other candidates were in there with him, like cats in the yarn. After declaring
- [Mission Gone Bad](http://commonwonders.com/mission-gone-bad/) - “The best strategic minds in both parties have argued for months that the answer is essentially to muddle our way out, cut our losses carefully and try to salvage what we can from a mission gone bad.” This isn’t pretty. Not when you think about the glory we reveled in four years ago. A superpower
- [Caged Priest](http://commonwonders.com/caged-priest/) - Probably few people this side of Gitmo are more profoundly outcast from society and human sympathy than convicted child molester priests. How tempting, then, to allow ourselves to feel a terrible spark of collective pride in our dysfunctional penal system at their sentencing — in anticipation of the “prison justice” they likely face. “He is
- [Homeland Conspiracy](http://commonwonders.com/homeland-conspiracy/) - Of all the things out there to be afraid of, why have we wasted so much ink and airtime on the vaguely troubled churnings of Michael Chertoff’s gut? And why, for that matter, do the media, dutifully following the lead of the Bush administration, show such ongoing reverence for al-Qaida’s alleged capacity to bring us
- [The Secular God](http://commonwonders.com/the-secular-god/) - Even as we throw a wall of barbed wire and tin across our southern border, we’re allowing the only national wall that actually serves a legitimate purpose to fall into serious disrepair, with signs of active government collusion in its collapse. The wall, of course, is the one that separates church and state — and
- [Gorilla Suit](http://commonwonders.com/gorilla-suit/) - For all the noise and carnage of war — especially this unnecessary war, which seems to possess a life of its own as it barrels forward uninterrupted on two fronts — our language of condemnation remains remarkably polite. Thus a new CBS news poll shows that Americans are “increasingly dissatisfied” with the Iraq operation, with
- [The Violence Interrupters](http://commonwonders.com/the-violence-interrupters/) - A dozen of us stood around a dead flower and a piece of bare sidewalk. There may have been more ho-hum in my heart than grief, at least at first, but slowly something started to break. “Oh God, have mercy.” This is what we chanted. I paw at hope as I write about this —
- [The Hearts of All Sane Men](http://commonwonders.com/the-hearts-of-all-sane-men/) - So we bomb a school and then are aghast when seven children die. “If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that air strike would have occurred,” a spokesman for what the media still bother to call “the coalition” said afterward, by way of explanation if not apology.
- [Belief and Doubt](http://commonwonders.com/belief-and-doubt/) - Cindy Sheehan’s temporary withdrawal — in exhaustion and frustration — from a leadership role in opposition to the war that claimed her son has at least given the mainstream media something to talk about: the antiwar movement’s lack of a “face,” or celebrity void. That’s news, I guess, while mere abysmal poll numbers, which indicate
- [The Conscience of Los Alamos](http://commonwonders.com/the-conscience-of-los-alamos/) - I looked up when Ed pointed to the butte that loomed suddenly in the bend of the mountain road and said, “See. That’s where they should go, right there.” And for an instant I imagined them towering against the big sky over Los Alamos, N.M.: two white granite “peace obelisks” 30 feet high, signaling to
- [Blair’s Law](http://commonwonders.com/blairs-law/) - As the boy, an honor student, a hero, lay bleeding on the floor of the Chicago Transit Authority bus, he told paramedics, “Tell my parents I love them.” The bus, the school day, the whole world stops, but only for an eye blink: a headline or two. I wish the freeze-frame of collective grief could
- [Rescuing the Democrats](http://commonwonders.com/rescuing-the-democrats/) - The war maker’s conceit and cruelest lie is that he’s protecting the women and children. Now moms around the world have had enough of it and are stepping forward to save their children, and while they’re at it the human race itself, from this lie — even if it means being led away in handcuffs.
- [The Crusaders](http://commonwonders.com/the-crusaders/) - Sixteen words may be all that stand right now between the apparatus of government and the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare. And those words are starting to give. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” When George Bush, in the wake of 9/11, puffed
- [Green Beacon](http://commonwonders.com/green-beacon/) - Harvey Wasserman’s newly published “Solartopia!” is a breath of fresh air, blowing — well, whipping, at Great Plains velocity —across the thinking person’s vision of the future. What a gift this book is: an informed, science-savvy vision of tomorrow that isn’t an eco-nightmare. Rather, it’s an enthusiastically optimistic look at a rational, very green near
- [Season of Grief](http://commonwonders.com/season-of-grief/) - The news went straight to the Dad Zone of my heart and I thought about my 20-year-old daughter finishing up her junior year in St. Paul, Minn. I thought about book bags and attitude, tentative career plans and those uncomfortable plastic chairs with the flip-up elbow rests — the stuff of a young person’s becoming
- [Thwarted Warrior](http://commonwonders.com/thwarted-warrior/) - “It’s not about me,” Doug Rokke said, and only reluctantly rattled off his laundry list of symptoms: fibromyalgia, broken teeth, radiation-induced cataracts, gastrointestinal pain. And I know it’s not about him, any more than it’s about you or me. “It.” The war, the consequences. The environmental consequences are beyond calculation, and perhaps for that reason
- [Devil Weed](http://commonwonders.com/devil-weed/) - “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” So of course a guy like Bernie Ellis — who signs his letters with this catchphrase, and who lives it in so many ways, doing what needs to be done, putting himself in the vanguard of vital social movements like the one for fair elections (which is
- [Symbolism and Duct Tape](http://commonwonders.com/symbolism-and-duct-tape/) - “The Army has yet to provide the family with a copy of the original narrative required by Army Regulation to support the award of the Silver Star.” The simplest truths bedevil chronic liars, even those with multibillion-dollar budgets. So as the family of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal football player who enlisted in the
- [Mission Accomplished](http://commonwonders.com/mission-accomplished/) - Forget the shattered lives and grieving next of kin, the brain injuries, the lost trillions, the global animosity, the waterboarding, the war profiteering, the public disgust. Four years into the Big Mistake, we’re poised to do it again, and probably — in a generation, in 10 years, before the next election (place your bets) —
- [Hemorrhaging Nirvana](http://commonwonders.com/hemorrhaging-nirvana/) - “Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, this is so cool!” You want a guided tour of the human brain? My guess is that you probably can’t do better than “My Stroke of Insight,” Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Taylor’s extraordinary account
- [Count the Quagmires](http://commonwonders.com/count-the-quagmires/) - Anybody who thought this was going to be an “easy war,” please raise your hand. By now, the horror and scandal have exceeded the expectations of even the harshest critics of the invasion — mine, for instance — and I numbly play Count the Quagmires along with the rest of the media and general public.
- [Hold the Mushrooms](http://commonwonders.com/hold-the-mushrooms/) - Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest — the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago — enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win. This unprecedented development
- [Stale Glory](http://commonwonders.com/stale-glory/) - “I thought about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar.” — Maya Lin, speaking of her initial vision of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall The most frequently visited and heart-tearing monument in Washington D.C. is nearing its 25th birthday, its
- [Sorry About That](http://commonwonders.com/sorry-about-that/) - For a documentary on the 100-year history — and horror — of aerial bombardment, Barry Stevens’ “The Bomber’s Dream” has a remarkably deft touch. The emotion driving the film isn’t outrage so much as jumpiness, of the sort that bedeviled Stevens’ mother, a survivor of the Nazis’ rocket blitz on London during World War II,
- [A World That Works For Everybody](http://commonwonders.com/a-world-that-works-for-everybody/) - Peace is a chant, a vibration, a leap of the human spirit into the 21st century and beyond. It’s also HR 808 — radical common sense crafted into a bill and introduced this week into the new Congress by Dennis Kucinich. Let me describe for you, as best I can in this brief space, the
- [A New Manifest Destiny](http://commonwonders.com/a-new-manifest-destiny/) - Half a million people marching against the war seem to be cursed to have their numbers reported as “tens of thousands” in the mainstream media for reasons that strike me as similar to the reeling U.S. auto industry’s ongoing reliance on monster SUV sales (and didn’t Ford make headlines by hemorrhaging almost $13 billion last
- [Heaven Waited](http://commonwonders.com/heaven-waited/) - I’m still waiting for Art Buchwald’s next column. If I had any decent sources in heaven I’d ask them to get me an interview with him, just to check in, see how the first week went and find out when he’s going to start writing again. But he was the one with all the great
- [‘Un-Inventing’ Nukes](http://commonwonders.com/un-inventing-nukes/) - Ever notice how we’re always getting the “done deal” treatment from the powers that be? We blunder into Iraq on lies and inanities and suddenly, you know, the proprietors of the Pottery Barn step out from behind the counter and inform us: “You break it, you bought it.” And so we have no choice, apparently,
- [A Different Story](http://commonwonders.com/a-different-story/) - Back to Saddam one last time, and his trial and death, and the strong possibility — indeed, the common-sense conclusion — that part of the point of the charade was to silence him. Why else try him only for his earliest crimes when the later ones racked up the big numbers (and, incidentally, served so
- [Celebrity Carnage](http://commonwonders.com/celebrity-carnage/) - "He spent the rest of the day working to pull the dead bodies of his family from the rubble of his home, finally reaching his dead son at 4:00 p.m." — Human Rights Watch, in a 2003 report on the U.S. air war in Iraq and the campaign to execute Baathist leadership with high explosives
- [Live Spring](http://commonwonders.com/live-spring/) - Is Santa real? What about God? Or Mr. Stranger Danger? A 5-year-old's curiosity is a wonder to behold — more than a wonder if you haven't had your coffee yet, or if you're trying to get last-minute Christmas shopping done at Target and your son says he wants to die right now so he can
- [Ignorant Armies](http://commonwonders.com/ignorant-armies/) - “If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent, if I was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my first question . . . is what mission is it these troops are supposed to accomplish?” We’ve been in Iraq how long? Spilled how much blood? Squandered how much treasure? Spread how much toxic waste?
- [Rules of Engagement](http://commonwonders.com/rules-of-engagement/) - What illegitimate secrets lie hidden behind the word “classified”? “The government is stalling us,” Marguerite Hiken of the Military Law Task Force told me. “They’re going to be embarrassed and they’re scared to death of war crimes charges.” Could it be that some high-level secrets are that tawdry? Could it be that war is waged
- [Electronic Treason](http://commonwonders.com/583-2/) - Electronic voting, like the war in Iraq, is starting to get bad press. And following the debacle of last month’s midterm elections, a lot of people have begun to demand an exit strategy. Surely there ought to be a limit to the number of egregiously wrong turns the same ideologues are allowed to make at
- [Blood Fatigue](http://commonwonders.com/blood-fatigue/) - Troublemaker Charles Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has a deliciously bad idea. The New York congressman recently reprised his audacious proposal — first made nearly four years ago, with the U.S. about to launch Operation Iraqi Quagmire — to reinstate the draft. He reasoned that, if a military action
- [The Peace Majority](http://commonwonders.com/the-peace-majority/) - Tony Blair told it like it was the other day — well, almost. What he did was demonstrate that the echo of truth often drowns out even its most shameless evasions. "There's a deliberate strategy," he told David Frost, "... to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced
- [The Vote Protectors](http://commonwonders.com/the-vote-protectors/) - “After the first challenge, this one big guy stood over me and pointed his finger,” Anne Schultz e-mailed me. “Shaking a bit with anger, he said that he could throw me out in a minute for disrupting the election. The woman was on her way out of the polling place, and I asked her to
- [The Drama of Empty Numbers](http://commonwonders.com/the-drama-of-empty-numbers/) - And the voters went “Ahem.” Even with a 40 percent national turnout, which, I know, is good for a midterm election in the world’s oldest and most complacent democracy, I find myself battling doubt and skepticism a day later that the criminally incompetent Bush administration has actually gotten its comeuppance. At the very least, I
- [The Cry of Our Inner Gandhi](http://commonwonders.com/the-cry-of-our-inner-gandhi/) - “While Republicans fight the War on Terror, grow our robust economy, and crack down on illegal immigration, House Democrats plot to establish a Department of Peace, raise your taxes, and minimize penalties for crack dealers. The difference couldn’t be starker.” As a contribution to the general noise and ignorance, House Whip Roy Blunt’s Web-site politicking
- [A Few Corpses Past ‘Whatever’](http://commonwonders.com/a-few-corpses-past-whatever/) - The judgment of history is closing in on us. A new study in a respected British medical journal has put the “excess death” toll in post-invasion Iraq at a soul-numbing 650,000, which, of course, can’t be true. No way. Can’t be. Those who have wedded themselves to this war, beginning with President Bush, prefer the
- [Naked and Afraid](http://commonwonders.com/naked-and-afraid/) - What blessings, what outrage. The Amish child said, “Shoot me first.” The survivors counseled forgiveness and prayed for the soul of the murderer. This was all too solemn and too real to be purveyed by the mainstream media as picturesque curiosity, horse-and-buggy morality in the age of the Hummer. The Amish modeled courage and healing
- [The Headless Crisis](http://commonwonders.com/the-headless-crisis/) - As the party of torture and war profiteering finally founders on a scandal tawdry and trivial enough to achieve media staying power — a month before the congressional election, no less — I counsel sober restraint on the ironic gloating. Sure, if the outing of U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s gay chat-room banter with an underage
- [‘This Cannot Be’](http://commonwonders.com/this-cannot-be/) - New, from the I-hate-government crowd: mandatory voter ID! The last time fiscal and moral folly merged so shamelessly with political opportunism, we invaded Iraq. The primary question in my mind, as I ponder the latest assault on rationality to emanate from our GOP-controlled Congress (how much longer, Lord?), is to what extent these radicals believe
- [Reclaiming Omelas](http://commonwonders.com/reclaiming-omelas/) - “In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. ... In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or
- [The Worst of the Worst](http://commonwonders.com/556-2/) - “This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.” — George W. Bush, Sept. 11, 2006 Oh Lord, if only he meant it. So many of us saw it five years ago — in that fleeting eternity, as the towers slid to earth, taking with them unknown
- [Comic-book Patriotism](http://commonwonders.com/comic-book-patriotism/) - You, sir, should be horsewhipped.” Nothing like a little intimidation to liven up my ongoing meditation on a just society. To be threatened with e-mail violence by a Marine Corps major (ret.) steeped in righteousness — wow, how deliciously personal and unfair. What a lovely mixture of bile and adrenaline it sets to bubbling. What
- [Twenty Gandhis](http://commonwonders.com/twenty-gandhis/) - As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many of the nation’s values — tolerance, forgiveness, personal freedom, perhaps even courage itself — remain trapped in the wreckage. It may take another anniversary, another 9/11 — Sept. 11, 1906, to be precise — simply to remind us of what lies buried beneath the fear and cynicism,
- [Semper Why?](http://commonwonders.com/semper-why/) - He was a tough kid and determined to take what they could give him, but the dirty needle was too much. Join the Marines, spit up blood. Talk about a military that’s strained to the breaking point. They’re enforcing stop-loss orders, calling up the reserves, extending the enlistment age (in a recent spoof of a
- [The Smell of Fear](http://commonwonders.com/the-smell-of-fear/) - That $100-a-bottle perfume that inconvenienced passengers tossed into airport trash cans last week, along with the lip gloss, toothpaste and shampoo, added the missing element of home-front sacrifice to the war on terror, which may explain why initial media coverage was so enthusiastic and skepticism-free. It was a story everyone understood — us vs. them,
- [Smiling Buddha](http://commonwonders.com/smiling-buddha/) - “Everyone in Utah can tell you a story — or take you to a cemetery and show you where loved ones are buried ...” Alyson Heyrend, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, was talking about the experience of being a “downwinder,” and she could have been speaking for residents of Nevada, Idaho, Montana and
- [Blowback From a Bad War](http://commonwonders.com/blowback-from-a-bad-war/) - And where is it that the Vice Lords meet the Aryan Nation? Why, in Baghdad, of course — where, in one of the less obvious unanticipated consequences of W’s disastrous war, potential domestic terrorists and “army of one” nutjobs are getting top-notch weapons instruction and plenty of target practice. It’s sure to come in handy
- [Birth Pangs](http://commonwonders.com/birth-pangs/) - I think Condi's right. As Israel wreaks biblical vengeance on Lebanon, we may well be witnessing, as she put it, "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." But the devil baby that crawls out of the wreckage will be one that makes even her boss pause mid-swagger. God help us. The reckless cynics are
- [The Shadow Report](http://commonwonders.com/the-shadow-report/) - “Torture is wrong no matter where it occurs, and the United States will continue to lead the fight to eliminate it everywhere.” OK, calm down, take a couple deep breaths. Lies this shameless always come back to haunt the teller. Indeed, the government report from which this quote is excerpted — the “Second Periodic Report
- [Wounded to the soul](http://commonwonders.com/wounded-to-the-soul/) - “The question that remains is: Are we who want the killing to stop as committed to peace as those who are committed to war?” Ouch, this is a devilishly tough question, unless you’re content to answer it in the negative. Then, of course, no problem. A bitter grimace and a stiff drink or whatever (name
- [Hadji Girl](http://commonwonders.com/hadji-girl/) - For some reason, the grunt’s love song made the brass cringe: “I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me . . . as the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally.” Cpl. Joshua Belile had a recording contract and everything, but, uh-uh.
- [Spreading Cancer](http://commonwonders.com/spreading-cancer/) - The unending game of “pretend” that the U.S. media allow George Bush to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though they were plausible — as though a class of third-graders couldn’t demolish them with a few innocent questions — feels
- [Shushing Big Money](http://commonwonders.com/shushing-big-money/) - In the old monarchies of Europe, the resident populace were known as subjects. Here in the New World, where mankind started over, we're citizens, a word that pulses with self-governing power. This is pretty scary, and there's plenty of pressure on us not to take this role literally. Democracy is dangerous, after all. It's always
- [A Vote of No Confidence](http://commonwonders.com/a-vote-of-no-confidence/) - “Before his swearing-in, Bilbray said he looked forward to replacing the images of airplanes that used to decorate the walls with photos of surfboards and sailboats.” — USA Today Unfortunately, the immigrant-bashing Brian Bilbray wasn’t talking about decorating his dorm room. California’s newest congressman is moving into the Rayburn House Office Building, specifically the office
- [Truth Hound](http://commonwonders.com/truth-hound/) - “Governments don’t keep secrets to protect the public, but to deceive the public.” Greg Palast happens to be talking about a certain Big Oil-friendly blueprint for the future of the Iraqi oil industry when he makes this point, almost in passing, in his just-released book, Armed Madhouse (Dutton), but he could be stating the general
- [Uproar Downwind](http://commonwonders.com/uproar-downwind/) - That "perfectly safe" mushroom cloud that was supposed to rise 10,000 feet over the Nevada Test Site this month will have to remain a mere gleam in Donald Rumsfeld's eye for the time being. The security state, which had planned to jump-start its WMD program with a supposedly conventional explosion large enough to mimic the
- [Stay the lie](http://commonwonders.com/stay-the-lie/) - As we stare with sudden revulsion at the apparent cold-blooded murder of Iraqi civilians in Haditha — at least 15, maybe twice that number, killed by Marines avenging a buddy, including a 3-year-old girl, and men shoved into a closet, and a man kneeling in prayer — let us have the wit not to feign
- [Dancing With Fear](http://commonwonders.com/dancing-with-fear/) - I knew there was a war on against cancer and, oh yeah, drugs, illiteracy, poverty, crime and, of course, terror, and that many arenas — sports, religion, business and politics, to name a few — are often portrayed as war without the body bags. But I was still surprised to read recently in the New
- [Shadow America](http://commonwonders.com/shadow-america/) - Since Congress won’t seriously entertain the impeachment of George Bush, fed-up segments of the American public are taking matters into their own hands and “impeaching” him symbolically. It’s part of the phenomenon of the Bush administration’s unraveling. Historians recently joined the fun, with more than half the participants in a recent poll conducted by History
- [Divine Strake](http://commonwonders.com/divine-strake/) - Will residents of Las Vegas be seeing a mushroom cloud over their city next month? As I write this, "Divine Strake," the big bang with the macabre and vaguely blasphemous name (the military-industrial complex is playing God again), has been postponed from June 2 to June 23, thanks to legal proceedings against the Defense Threat
- [Crossing the Border](http://commonwonders.com/crossing-the-border/) - Four hundred thousand people coursing for miles through Chicago streets on May 1 — laughing, clapping, chanting joyously, bearing signs as heart-breakingly plaintive as "We Are Workers, Not Criminals" and "No Human Being Is Illegal" — came down, for me, to the image of one middle-aged woman walking beside her husband, silently signaling that the
- [The FEMA Gap](http://commonwonders.com/the-fema-gap/) - “Sir . . . sir.” Need has a tone of voice that’s hard to ignore, as badly as I might want to. It pierced my purposeful hurry this night. I had stopped at the store after work and was carrying two plastic bags of groceries — milk, OJ, cottage cheese — which were cutting into
- [A Sense of Urgency](http://commonwonders.com/a-sense-of-urgency/) - We call our disillusion with democracy “politics” and let it go at that. It’s raw, it’s dirty. The fix is always in. You’ve got to be a cynic to go into it — able to tolerate the stench of moral compromise. You’ve got to serve the shadowy interests of the powerful; you’ve got to play
- [How Big Is My God?](http://commonwonders.com/how-big-is-my-god/) - Wow, go America — stand proud and immovable in your diversity and the dignity of your humanity. My heart swells as the country I believe in forges itself in the streets of city after city, with people fighting once more for their fundamental rights and defying the blind and the smug. The battle for the
- [Closing the Secret School](http://commonwonders.com/closing-the-secret-school/) - Something was missing when Father Roy Bourgeois and several companions traveled through South America last month: fear. Or rather, as he said it, almost reverently, “FEAR-R-R-R” — a big, lingering, life-shaping word, clotted with grief and inexpressible rage. As he spoke the word, it was alive with the memory of midnight knocks and disappeared loved
- [Faith-Based Voting](http://commonwonders.com/faith-based-voting/) - Oh, those glitches! For some reason we tolerate them a lot more in an election — that is to say, in the mechanics of democracy, something we affect to believe in so fervently we're willing to go to war to make sure other countries have it — than we would in, let's say, our banking
- [The Definition of Insanity](http://commonwonders.com/the-definition-of-insanity/) - “We have a responsibility to promote human freedom. Yet freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen.” The more I ponder these words, the deeper my confusion grows — at the consciousness that confabulated them, at the futility of any possible response. And so the war enters its fourth year, impervious to its own unpopularity,
- [Trust us](http://commonwonders.com/trust-us/) - Something fundamental about who we are as a nation is dribbling away, it seems, without alarm or even debate. We torture prisoners - it's out in the open, a done deal. We're fighting an unnecessary war that, well, yes, was launched on a lie, but too late now; we're in, we can't get out. And
- [Whistling Diebold](http://commonwonders.com/whistling-diebold/) - They ain't gonna kiss you just because you're a whistleblower. No matter that you exposed wrongdoing and struck a blow for fair elections. The larger good isn't always obvious to the powers that be. So Steve Heller, a Los Angeles-based actor whose day job is doing temporary office work, faces three felony charges, all of
- [Bush and Gandhi](http://commonwonders.com/bush-and-gandhi/) - “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?” There is a terrible profanity in George Bush’s intention to lay a wreath at the memorial of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who uttered
- [Safe to be racist](http://commonwonders.com/safe-to-be-racist/) - Maybe we should be careful about making common cause with born-again free speech advocates who never showed any tolerance for it until it became a handy club for bashing Muslims. Before the furor over the Danish cartoons caricaturing the prophet Muhammad cools into caricature itself — as in, “Remember when all those Muslims went nuts
- [The Nader Effect](http://commonwonders.com/the-nader-effect/) - Two ghosts stalk the national Democratic Party in its pitiful, 21st century incarnation. One is George McGovern, who taught them that only Republican values matter in a national election. The other is Ralph Nader, who taught them who the real enemy is. The present hamstrung state of the party is the result of its abject
- [Give peace a vote](http://commonwonders.com/give-peace-a-vote/) - A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, Bill Scheurer realized that the nation's soul was in jeopardy. He saw George Bush on TV, standing in the rubble of Ground Zero, whipping the national grief into carte blanche for revenge. Behind him, as the death toll wavered, people held up a banner that screamed: 6,000 MORE
- [Hole in the future](http://commonwonders.com/hole-in-the-future/) - For those impervious to the suffering of others, a dollar figure sometimes helps bring it home. Two honest economists have recently put one on the Iraq war, and in so doing shone a spotlight on the black hole in the center of our future. If $1 trillion makes you gag, try $2 trillion. The latter
- [Relevant Saint](http://commonwonders.com/relevant-saint/) - He had his day. Now let’s drag him out of sainthood and back into controversy and relevance. Martin Luther King has more to give us in the 21st century than a three-day weekend. Just read the speeches that haven’t been chiseled in stone yet. “This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of
- [The Polite Majority](http://commonwonders.com/the-polite-majority/) - The media buzz about impeachment may be at 1 percent of the level it was during Monicagate, but guess what? The imperial presidency has less public support right now than the promiscuous presidency did at its lowest point - and as this administration's outrages pile up, George Bush seems to be losing his mandate simply
- [Birth of Awareness](http://commonwonders.com/birth-of-awareness/) - One of the heroes of My Lai died a few days ago, dislodging the old horrors and a fleeting national debate the world is begging us to reopen. Are we the good guys? Is God on our side? "We kept flying back and forth, reconning in front and in the rear, and it didn't take
- [Primal smirk](http://commonwonders.com/primal-smirk/) - I ache with fresh hope and foreboding at this time of year. The time is ripe for an overarching vision of a world without war — a tough, smart vision that can claim headlines and hold its own with the spin machines of government. Without it, we’re doomed to . . . war with Iran?
- [Values in shrink-wrap](http://commonwonders.com/values-in-shrink-wrap/) - Amid the love and ripped shrink-wrap plastic of Christmas, my 7-month-old great nephew, Joey, sat contentedly gumming the cardboard label on a stuffed pink elephant he'd been given - his grin piercing the excesses of the season that lay crumpled all around him. Bear with me for a moment, please, while I tread gingerly through
- [Fear of the Devil](http://commonwonders.com/fear-of-the-devil/) - The nation is headed for a showdown with Evil ... or rather, with the sense-shattering, all-justifying, absolute belief in it. My God — finally! Here, for instance, is U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, explaining to Wolf Blitzer and archconservative (but pro-Constitution) former congressman Bob Barr on CNN's "The Situation Room" last week why George Bush needs
- [Panic attack](http://commonwonders.com/panic-attack/) - Five shots rang out in the name of homeland security and suddenly a nervous, Costa Rica-born U.S. citizen lay dead on a jetway at Miami International Airport — tragic collateral damage in a war that seems less rational with each passing day. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman later tried to fob off last week's
- [Flickering Dreams of Peace](http://commonwonders.com/flickering-dreams-of-peace/) - Ever try to shift a paradigm? I salute the brave souls scattered around the continent — some of them are in Congress — who are doing just that, who are daring, right now, to challenge the conventional wisdom of war and peace at the highest levels at which the game of geopolitics is played, and
- [Inconvenient Journalists](http://commonwonders.com/inconvenient-journalists/) - “Our goal . . . is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.” Dig up an old lie from one of George Bush’s forgotten speeches and the stench is asphyxiating, as though it’s coming from the rotting corpse of democracy itself. The words quoted above are
- [Poll Shock](http://commonwonders.com/poll-shock/) - One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process — and democracy itself. But you won’t learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch,
- [Shake and Bake](http://commonwonders.com/shake-and-bake/) - Turns out the United States doesn’t use chemical weapons the same way it doesn’t do torture. It took an Italian TV documentary and the digging of bloggers among obscure documents and bits of data, but a hideous practice of our military, long rumored and alleged — that we used something other than bullets and conventional
- [A Crime Without a Name](http://commonwonders.com/a-crime-without-a-name/) - Some news is so big it won’t fit into a headline. For example: WIDESPREAD VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT IN 2004. Sorry. It may be true, but it’s a no-go on the front pages and TV news programs of America. The reality hovers namelessly, like the disappeared of Central America. Shhh, don’t refer to it directly. Wait 20
- [The Future Eaters](http://commonwonders.com/the-future-eaters/) - Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast, and these nerve gas canisters are so small . . . Splash! And another dirty secret disappears into the deep. We are the future eaters, to borrow a phrase from Australian biologist Tim Flannery, as quoted by Ronald Wright in his harrowing investigation of why civilizations collapse, “A
- [Impeachable offense](http://commonwonders.com/impeachable-offense/) - In 1970, Gerald Ford defined an impeachable offense in unarguably practical terms, as: “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Ford’s defintion is the only thing saving George Bush’s hide right now, as Plamegate hemorrhages and the high-level machinations that drove the country into
- [‘Name This Body Part’](http://commonwonders.com/name-this-body-part-2/) - The day after Iraq’s constitutional referendum — its latest “democratic milestone”— was proclaimed a success, distraught families at a Ramadi hospital fought over the body parts of loved ones severed in a U.S. air strike. It’s a lot harder to play pretend democracy in Iraq than it is to applaud it here in the United
- [The God of Torture](http://commonwonders.com/the-god-of-torture/) - Look! It’s the Energizer President! On and on he goes, never departing from script. “We’re facing,” he said, about the same time that he was threatening to veto the Senate’s anti-torture amendment, “a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.” In the closed circuit of George Bush’s innocence, he
- [Ballot and Soul](http://commonwonders.com/ballot-and-soul/) - If I want to generate a little fear-based insomnia, all I have to do is remind myself just before bedtime that the 2006 elections are barely a year away. Suddenly I’m awash in cold sweat and my heart starts pounding like a steam piston. No, please, somebody stop the clock. It’s too soon. We can’t
- [Unsheathed future](http://commonwonders.com/unsheathed-future/) - When the all-clear goes out for New Orleans and environs, with government spokesmen declaring the devastated area officially open for business, my suggestion is, hold onto your protective gear. The U.S. economy signed a non-aggression pact with cancer a long time ago and the Bush administration has honored it more enthusiastically than any other. The
- [Soul work](http://commonwonders.com/soul-work/) - Believe me, the most significant moment of this past weekend, which I spent at a YMCA camp northwest of Chicago with 13 other guys, was not — for me or anyone else — my bedtime rendition of “Que Sera, Sera.” When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, What will I be?
- [Circles of Hell](http://commonwonders.com/circles-of-hell/) - As the layers of hell reveal themselves in the shocking details that continue to emerge from New Orleans, it becomes increasingly clear that natural disaster constitutes only the outer circle. “As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began
- [Our Third World](http://commonwonders.com/our-third-world/) - And so the real enemy showed itself and we lost the Big Easy. Before we sort out the small blames — the funding cuts to FEMA, the cronyism and amateurism that silently ravaged our national disaster response preparedness under the Bush administration, the bleeding of the economy and diversion of resources caused by the war
- [Pat and God](http://commonwonders.com/pat-and-god/) - God speaks through fools. With this in mind, let’s listen one last time (I hope) to Pat Robertson: “We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s
- [Outraged nurturers](http://commonwonders.com/outraged-nurturers/) - “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” — Virginia Woolf, “Three Guineas” I was mistaken last week — so my long-time correspondent Richard Moloney pointed out to me — when I enthused about the uniqueness of Cindy Sheehan’s standoff

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