Robert Koehler

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 . ....

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...

"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...

The city of Chicago and the federal government will be putting on a $55 million security extravaganza later this month in part 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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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....

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:

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...

"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...

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...

"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...

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.

I...

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?

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...

"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 sale of arms to Iraq (remember Iraq?)...

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...