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, March 14, 2019 Artificial Morality 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, March 07, 2019 Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth “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 , refer to... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 28, 2019 The Squirming Buddha 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. For words... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 21, 2019 Are You Black, White or Human? 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... Read more |
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Views Saturday, February 16, 2019 The Music That's In All of Us 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,” the organizer of... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 07, 2019 Jim Crow Jumps into the Game 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 may... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 01, 2019 Disarmament, Not Low-Yield Nukes 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... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 25, 2019 King’s Vision Is Still Defiant 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 17, 2019 What About Open Borders? 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 10, 2019 A Green Future Is One Without War 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 the increasingly... Read more |