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Robert C. KoehlerCommon Dreams |
How do we transcend our collective awareness beyond the artificial borders we’ve created?
Trump has offered his base a spiritual sanctuary, a home allegedly secure from perceived (and invented) enemies. Instead of creating a different...
Peace may still be confined to the social margins, but peace proponents, especially those who have transformed their own victimhood into agency,...
It’s a world in which only some lives matter, which winds up meaning that no lives matter. It’s the definition of hell and it’s the militarized...
Hold a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the agency of the commander-in-chief. What could happen next is not hard to imagine. Indeed, as we know,...
Much as “Who won?” seems to be the media focal point, my question is: Did anybody win? Did the whole country lose?
If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and...
We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are...
The message I hear is this: Democrats are as patriotic as Republicans! Democrats are as religious as Republicans! We can put on a good show too!
40,000 (or more) Palestinians have been killed so far; this is one of them.
Militarism is more than the flow of blood. It’s also the flow of money.
From guns to militarism, the national religion is the religion of us vs. them.
I invite you to join me as I reach for a larger context in which to put this flickering moment.
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea,...
The irony of the Israeli arms ban and reinstatement is the incursion of “moral integrity” into an event about the most up-to-date ways to kill...
Should our country return to a place of godliness? Not if the god in question is wielding a sword, or has his finger on the nuclear button.
Winning isn’t really the point anymore, at least from the point of view of the moneyed interests of war; what matters is waging it—that is to say,...
The point I’m struggling to make in this moment is that love— in the deepest possible meaning of the word—is more powerful than growling dogs...
It’s not just a matter of attending lectures, taking notes, absorbing data. It means finding your voice – finding your deepest values and...
Peaceful, intensely determined protesters, demanding their institutions divest from the Israeli war machine, face violent resistance from police.
The mass atrocity may be over, but our meditations on such violence do not end and perhaps still we have much to learn.
The corporate media covers conflicts like Israel and Iran’s with win-lose abstraction, even when we’re on the brink of World War III.
If “war made the state and the state made war,” then the state, as currently perceived, at least by those besotted with military power, is the...
Condemning “war crimes” is nothing more than a shrug; it’s war itself that must be not simply “condemned,” but transcended.
There are natural borders and natural differences between people, but to arm those differences and make them absolute, utterly, utterly ignores the...
This is the language of peace. It swells the heart, it transcends the small-mindedness of global politics.
While I certainly join U.S. State Department Undersecretary Uzra Zeya in condemning all state-inflicted murder and ethnocide, I also condemn her...
We have to start claiming collective responsibility for the wrongs of our governments, which means confronting the dehumanization they use to justify...
His sacrifice begins to define the size of the changes we must make in our global politics, in our relationship with power, in our relationship with...
The following words are a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more...
How do the people claiming this is what "self-defense" looks like sleep at night?
Perhaps staring into the abyss created by the horrors and suffering of war will help us turn away from our violent path.
The very essence of evolution is the expansion of our thinking to embrace ever-larger realities of cooperation, connection, and understanding.
“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit," Martin Luther King Jr. famously said.
It’s time to break the cycle. That means living our values, not defying them.
Rather than sending more bombs and weaponry to Netanyahu, the United States—if it had the courage—could send him the opposite, the words of Martin...
I am continually confronted with the abstract statistics of war dead—in particular, children, each of whom was in the process of becoming himself or...
Poetry is one of humanity’s windows into the raw unknown — which happens to be both beyond our wildest dreams and deep within our inner being.
How can humanity be so blatantly flippant about its own suicide? Why are we so divided from ourselves?
Will we be able to overcome the wreckage we are inflicting on ourselves?