Robert C. Koehler

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, December 05, 2019 Envisioning a United World 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 Salvador,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 21, 2019 Ilhan Omar's Call for Restorative Justice Gives Me Profound Hope for the Future “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—no, wait, I mean a proud American—were directed at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar earlier this year. He had called her office and talked to a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 14, 2019 Celebrating Peace: A Work in Progress 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 its perpetuity. The name... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 07, 2019 A Tight Grip On Our Nuclear Toys “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 Agency,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 31, 2019 Keeping the Peace Is Far More Complicated Than Waging War 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 hands behind his back, kicking... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 24, 2019 Clinton, Stein, Gabbard, and the Deconstruction of RussiaGate 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 17, 2019 The Collusion Of Church and State 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 10, 2019 The Rights Of Nature "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,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 03, 2019 Impeaching the Symptom, Not the Disease 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 26, 2019 Climate Change and Consciousness Shift 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... Read more |