Author: Robert C. Koehler

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Opinion The Last Word

War, Money, and Universities

Pro-Palestinian encampment at Tulane University (Photo: William Morgan | Dreamstime.com)

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 based on anything: a difference in race, language, culture — or simply opinion, which is beginning to happen on campuses across the country, as peaceful, intensely determined protesters, demanding their institutions divest from the Israeli war machine, face violent resistance from police and/or counter-protesters.

Yes, the peaceful protesters are interrupting the status quo — setting up encampments, even occupying university buildings. For instance, at Columbia University, students renamed the occupied Hamilton Hall, declaring its new name to be Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli armed forces, along with the rest of her family (and several aid workers), as they were fleeing their home in Gaza. The point of the protests is, indeed, to change the world: to stop U.S., including university, support of the devastating “war” (i.e., carnage). They’re not trying to eliminate an enemy but, rather, illuminate the situation — putting themselves on the line to do so.

Some of the responses to the protests are definitely illuminating. A statement from UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, for instance, noted: “The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror. For over seven hours, Zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, & threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment. They broke our barriers repeatedly, clearly in an attempt to kill us.”

Furthermore, the account went on: “Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for ‘backup’ watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated. Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help. … The university would rather see us dead than divest.”

In other words, those damn students are the enemy. Even when the response to the protests isn’t outright violence, it’s often rhetorically violent, such as GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee calling the protesters terrorists and declaring, “Any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorist acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the [Transportation Security Administration] No-Fly List.”

This is utterly linear, minimalist thinking. Critics aren’t engaging in a debate on the nature (and necessity) of war, plunging, with the protesters, into a complex discussion of global politics, military industrialism, and the morality of killing. That’s too much trouble! They’re simply calling the outraged protesters “the enemy” — just a bunch of terrorists, same as Hamas. And yeah, no doubt part of that good old axis of evil. 

This is the thinking the protesters are trying to disrupt! Alas, it’s also solidly part of the infrastructure of the status quo. Militarism is baked into the American core. When we’re not waging our own wars, we’re enabling various allies to do so.

As Heidi Peltier, writing at Brown University’s Costs of War Project, points out, regarding this country’s annual budget of nearly $2 trillion: “Almost half of the U.S. federal discretionary budget is allocated to the Department of Defense and more than half of the discretionary budget goes to ‘defense’ overall, which includes not only the DoD but also nuclear weapons programs within the Department of Energy and additional defense spending in other departments. … As a result, other elements and capacities of the U.S. government and civilian economy have been weakened, and military industries have gained political power. Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society — strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out.”

The campus protests around the country, at which, so far, more than 2,000 students have been arrested, primarily address the twisted irony of money. Universities have multi-billion-dollar endowments — donation money — which they then invest in the stock market, in various companies, including … well, yeah, weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and many more. Oh, the mysterious, ironic flow of money!

At New York University, a spokesman informed protesting students that the university is not divesting from such companies because it needs to maximize its investment returns in order to “help the university fulfil its research and educational mission.” You know, to bring truth and knowledge into the world — for the sake, among others, of the protesters themselves. 

American college students are facing this irony head on — at a personal cost. But the cost, as they say, is minimal, compared to the one being paid by Palestinians, and by victims of war all around the world. 

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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Opinion The Last Word

The ‘Accepted Insanity’ of World War III

“National interests” are the prize at stake. (Photo: James Vallee | Dreamstime.com)

“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 The New York Times — from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on brink of … uh, World War III. It’s the forgettable quotes, especially in regard to ongoing war, that may be the most dangerous because all they do is solidify a collective sense of normalcy. My term for it is “accepted insanity.” We have the technological and psychological capacity to kill not simply thousands or even millions of people but the whole human race, but let’s talk about it in terms of strategy, tactics, and public relations! Let’s talk about it as though we’re covering a bunch of 10-year-old boys throwing stones. Which one’s going to win?

That’s the key issue here: winning. When two cowboys face off in an armed confrontation, the one who draws and fires fastest, hitting the other guy in the stomach or wherever, wins. He gets to walk away with a self-satisfied smirk.

I’m not singling out the Times story quoted above as uniquely problematic in its coverage of the latest turn of events in the Middle East, but rather as representative of the accepted insanity of endless war — the reduction of war to an abstraction, virtually always involving clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and describing murder (including mass murder) as retaliation, self-defense, “show of force,” etc., etc. “National interests” are the prize at stake. Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

The Times story, for instance, steps beyond its abstraction of the Israel-Iran confrontation at one point. Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several Iranian officers, the story informs us. Iran retaliated two weeks later, firing 300 drones and missiles at Israel, almost all of which were shot down, and very little damage was caused. The Times notes: “The only serious casualty was a 7-year-old girl, Amina al-Hasoni, who was badly wounded.”

War affects children! Yes, yes, yes it does. My heart goes out to Amina al-Hasoni. But my God — some 13,000 children have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and thousands more injured, not to mention orphaned. And some are simply missing, lying under the rubble. What are their names?

What if war were covered the way street crime is covered — not as an abstraction, but with awareness that it’s a profound social problem? What if war were covered with external awareness, i.e. with wisdom that transcends political platitudes — rather than in obeisance to those platitudes?

Here, for instance, is CNBC reporting on the Israel-Iran confrontation. Noting that Israel has pledged to “exact a price” from Iran in response to the missile attack, CNBC then quotes President Biden condemning the attack and adding that the United States “will remain vigilant to all threats and will not hesitate to take all necessary action to protect our people.”

Can you believe that his words didn’t make me feel safer? I’d been pondering not just the possibility but the likely reality of World War III, and to read these words — “take all necessary action to protect our people” — made the wolves start to howl in my own soul.

Platitudes plus nukes? Biden wasn’t talking about transcending war and shunning the country’s trillion-dollar military budget. Presumably, he was talking about using it, putting it to work to “protect” us — you know, to “defeat” our declared enemy (Iran, apparently), no matter the price exacted on Planet Earth, including on you and me. How about some media coverage that doesn’t blow this off with a shrug?

Coverage of war requires awareness of the lies that prop it up politically. For instance, as World Beyond War has put it: “According to myth, war is ‘natural.’ Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among those who have taken part.”

In other words, war is not a product of human evolution — humanity finally becoming mature enough to fight itself in an organized, collective fashion — but essentially the opposite of that: an unevolved aspect of who we are … an embedded failure to evolve, you might say.

So many veterans, as the World Beyond War quote implies, often bear the burden of this truth well beyond their time of service. They are forced to face, on their own, the psychological and spiritual implications of what they did — of following orders, of participating in the dehumanization and murder of alleged enemies. In the wake of wars, vet suicide rates can be horrific. While such psycho-spiritual trauma is officially defined as a mental illness — post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — others with deeper understanding, including many vets, call it moral injury. Following orders forced them to act beyond their own humanity: When you dehumanize others, you dehumanize yourself.

This is the accepted insanity the corporate media cover with such win-lose abstraction, even when we’re on the brink of World War III. Multiply moral injury by several billion human beings and what you could wind up with is human extinction.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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Opinion The Last Word

Survival Without Bombs or Borders

Photo: Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com

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 put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: modernize, modernize, modernize. Threaten, threaten, threaten.

David Barash and Ward Wilson make the case that this is completely false. We’re not “stuck” with nuclear weapons any more than we’re stuck with obsolete and ineffective technology of any sort, bluntly pointing out: “Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned. Useless, dangerous, or outmoded technology needn’t be forced out of existence. Once a thing is no longer useful, it unceremoniously and deservedly gets ignored.”

This is a valid and significant challenge to the cynicism of so many people, which is an easy trap to get caught in. Nuclear weapons will eventually go the way of the penny-farthing (huge front-wheeled) bicycle, according to the authors. Humanity is capable of simply moving beyond this valueless technology — and eventually it will. The genie has no power to stop this. Praise the Lord.

Transcending cynicism is the first step in envisioning change — but envisioning change isn’t the same thing as creating it. The next step in the process is hardly a matter of “better technology” — i.e., a better (less radioactive?) means of killing the enemy. The next step involves a change in humanity’s collective consciousness. As far as I can tell, we’re caught — horrifically caged — in the psychology of a border-drawn, divided planet. Social scientist Charles Tilly once put it with stunning simplicity: “War made the state and the state made war.”

The human race cuddles with the concept of “state sovereignty.” It’s the basic right of the 193 national entities that have claimed their specific slices of Planet Earth — and I certainly understand the “sovereignty” part. Who doesn’t want to make his or her own life decisions? But the “state” part? It’s full of paradox and contradiction, not to mention a dark permission to behave at one’s worst. The militarism that worships the nuclear genie couldn’t exist without state sovereignty.

To me the question in crucial need of being asked right now is this: What is our alternative to nationalism, which currently claims free rein (and reign) on the planet? And nationalism strides with a lethal swagger — especially nuclear-armed nationalism. For instance, as the AP recently reported, “President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or independence is threatened, issuing another blunt warning to the West just days before an election in which he’s all but certain to secure another six-year term.”

Or here’s the Times of Israel: “Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas could be to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip …”

Plunk! Finish the job!

And then, of course, there’s the global good guy — USA! USA! — leading the charge to bring peace to the world wherever and however it can: for instance, by claiming “sovereignty” (you might say) over the national interests of South Korea and declaring, as Simone Chun puts it at Truthout, a “new Cold War with China” and implementing a “massive expansion of the provocative U.S.-led military exercises in the Korean Peninsula.”

Wow, a new Cold War! More than 300,000 South Korean troops and 10,000 American troops, in a series of war games known as “Freedom Shield 2024,” have conducted numerous field maneuvers, including bombing runs, at the North Korean border.

Chun writes: “The combined United States Forces Korea (USFK) and South Korean forces far overshadow those of North Korea, whose entire military budget is $1.47 billion compared to that of South Korea at $43.1 billion, not to mention that of the U.S. at $816.7 billion …

“The U.S. is using North Korea as a pretext for its new Cold War against China,” she goes on, “and, with its control of 40 percent of the world’s nuclear stockpile, is even willing to risk nuclear war to further its geopolitical aims.”

And she quotes Noam Chomsky who, addressing the country’s blatant indifference to this risk, points out that “the United States always plays with fire.”

How do we get it to stop? We live in a self-declared democracy but we, the people, are not the ones with real authority here. Those who run the show seem essentially blind to the consequences of militarism, war and, for God’s sake, nukes. Having power means having the ability to threaten — and, if necessary, cause — harm … beyond their divinely sanctioned borders, of course (not counting the likely consequences that know no borders).

If Tilly is right — 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 problem. Knowing this is the beginning … but of what? Survival means finding an answer.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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Opinion The Last Word

Poetry Bleeds from the Shattered Normal

Poetry is one of humanity’s windows into the unknown. (Photo: Marek Uliasz | Dreamstime.com)

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 YouTube, of parents who have just lost their children, their spouse, their siblings?

I have recently released an album of spoken-word poetry. Many of the poems go back to an earlier period of my life, shortly after the death of my wife from pancreatic cancer. At the time, my daughter was not quite 12 years old. Dad and teenage daughter — those were the days! (We both survived, I’m happy to say.) Losing myself in these poems so many years later is a mind-blow not merely because of the memories they unleash. They also have a relevance to today’s news … the ongoing abstraction of human life, the dismissal of the value of every living soul. Poetry is the opposite of that — not in simplistic but, rather, paradoxical ways. Its essential purpose is to break through the shallowness of normalcy, quite likely in surprising ways.

… God bless every finite movement of your heart’s laughter,

the rich earth of your love, the milk of your breasts, the tremor of your flesh.

And God bless diapers and tricycles and “Make Way for Ducklings” …

This is a passage from “Letting Her Go,” one of the poems I wrote in the aftermath of my wife’s death. The poem is awash in the small details of family life, so easily overlooked in the moment. The day simply pushes on. But when the normalcy is shattered into fragments — soul fragments, you might say …

God bless tantrums, ice cream, swimming pools, bugs and curiosity.

God bless every dropped pearl, every birthday cake,

all the soft inner matter of family life,

felt, lived, and pushed along with too much hurry.

The value, the depth of each moment, starts pulsating. As the poem pushes on, as I describe — relive — the last months of her life, I even write: “God bless cancer …” Those may be three of the strangest words I’ve ever written. They bled forth from my pen almost as a Zen koan. Do I know what I meant? Not really, but not knowing can be deeper than knowing. Indeed, “not knowing” is the human condition, and it includes knowing. For instance:

The city’s streets are alive with the eyes of beggars. …

This is the beginning of another poem, called “Open Souls.” Here again, “normalcy” conceals the troubling reality in which we live.

… They poke through the glass skin of prosperity,

too large and too human.

I am disturbed anew each time

I step around them,

but I seldom break stride.

Not to look

would be to ignore

open souls …

Ordinary guys, homeless, asking for spare change. They’re just collateral damage of the system. But the poem isn’t political — it’s pre-political, just like every poem is, or should be. It’s about feeling the pain, the love that hovers beyond the codified world.

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. In the world of poetry, there is no separation between church and state. The homeless guy at the subway station helped me grasp this.

The northbound train arrives;

shoes clatter faster around us.

From the wracking depths

he moans

“Pray for me.”

I did my best to gather together the pieces of this moment in my words. Yes, I prayed for him, in contradiction of my own beliefs (because what do I know?).

… Let him have

a room tonight

and breakfast in the morning

and a lucky break,

oh Lord,

if thou art merciful.

Let him not be the one

to die for our sins.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Truth May Hurt

Photo: Bahadir Yeniceri | Dreamstime

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 the world first from the Nazis, then from
the commies, and remain the greatest country ever. Hurray for capitalism! Any questions?

Oh, one last thing: The commies — aka the Marxists — are still around. They’re everywhere. As Ben Burgis noted, Marxism means “anything conservatives find frightening.” I recently learned, for instance, that they’ve invaded the Smithsonian Institution — specifically, an exhibit about Latino history in the United States. As critics wrote a year ago in The Hill: “A new Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History
offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion, and economics. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful.”

Indeed, the exhibit — which focuses on the history of Latino youth movements — is so outrageous, according to the critics, that it clearly demonstrates the need to cut congressionally approved funding for the construction of the National Museum of the American Latino, because … you know, the Marxists. Among their current tactics to undermine the greatest country ever is to write their own version of American history, which focuses on all the stuff we need to forget about.

Everyone knows about the ongoing conservative furor over schools teaching what they called “critical race theory.” This is a name they plunked from the world of academia and turned into an evil, Marxist plot to make (white) American children feel uncomfortable by forcing them to learn about how there used to be systemic racism in this country. That is, once upon a time, white America, in the wake of freeing the slaves and outlawing slavery, maintained its sense of supremacy by legally, and often violently, enforcing, as George Wallace once put it, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And of course, the essence of segregation was separate and unequal — from housing, jobs, and schools to bathrooms and drinking fountains.

From the conservative point of view: poof! It no longer exists, so it never happened. And those who insist otherwise are caught in the grip of Marxists — a term nowadays that simply means the purveyors of absolute evil. Beyond the teaching of history, here are a few other ways that Marxists, according to conservative writers and pundits, have infiltrated America:

• Global warming, aka climate justice, which, according to author Jordan Peterson, as quoted by Burgis, is “the new guise of murderous Marxism.”

• Black awareness, aka being woke. Ron DeSantis has described it as “a form of cultural Marxism,” which of course is pervading American schools.

• Gender equality. As AP reported, various Republicans, including DeSantis and Ted Cruz, have used the term cultural Marxism “to characterize fights for gender or racial equity that they argue are ‘woke’ and threaten a traditional American way of life.”

• Racial integration. Ah, the old days. In 1959, according to Current Affairs, protesters surrounded the Arkansas state capitol building in Little Rock, carrying signs that declared: “Race Mixing Is Communism.”

• The prosecution of Donald Trump. According to AP: “Hours after pleading not guilty in federal court, Trump told a crowd of his supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that Biden, ‘together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits, and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.’” He added that, even if the communists get away with this, “it won’t stop me.”

I’m sure there are more ways conservatives envision Marxists are trying to skewer the country’s greatness, or will in the future. For the moment, what continues to consume my attention is the right-wing desperation to control history and not simply challenge but banish any version of it that counters their certainty about who we are.

For instance, Alex Skopic at Current Affairs quotes author James Lindsay, who described efforts to address racial injustice in America as, in actuality, “the tip of a one-hundred-year-long spear that is being thrust into the side of Western civilization.” Ouch!

The present moment comes and goes. Apparently what matters is how — or whether — you talk about it afterwards. In other words, establishing our history creates the present. That’s the reason “critical race theory” is such a nuisance to the right wing. While I am willing to acknowledge that virtually any version of history is likely factually flawed and politically influenced, I would suggest to conservatives that trying to banish versions they don’t like, and writing them off as Marxist, will not make the truth go away.

History is not some kind of Biblical narrative: “In the beginning, God wrote the Declaration of Independence …” Or whatever. History is deeply complex and full of chaos. Our understanding of it is ever-shifting. Terrible things have occurred that need to be faced, addressed, and, eventually, transcended.

Johanna Fernandez, one of the historians who put together the Latino history exhibit that caused such a stir, said: “We live in La-La Land. White Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans walking around, really not understanding who we are, why we’re here, and how we got to this place. What’s so dangerous about honestly grappling with the history of this country?”

Grappling with history versus trying to control (and erase) it. There’s a lot of truth in our past we still need to face, however much it may hurt.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

Water Is Life — For the Privileged

Many take water for granted. (Photo: Ndoeljindoel | Dreamstime.com)

As the heat wave intensifies across the country, as workers exposed to the heat collapse on the job in increasing numbers — some of them die — Governor Greg Abbott of Texas recently signed a law nullifying local ordinances in the state that require 10-minute heat and water breaks for those who work in the sun.

Water is life! Yeah, so what, says Abbott and those who support this law. Critics call it the Death Star Law. Texas Representative Greg Casar, who recently staged a nine-hour thirst strike on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in protest of such laws — such indifference to the health and lives of so many American workers — said that Abbott, along with other GOP governors like Ron DeSantis, “are participating in the cruelty Olympics, trying to outdo each other.”

These are deeply troubling times, and no doubt there are matters of greater peril for humanity than the right of construction and other workers to drink water on the job, but when I began reading about this and related issues, something began tearing at my insides. Water is life! I could barely imagine not having access to it. As The Texas Observer noted:

“Climate scientists have projected that Texas summers will get increasingly hot if climate change continues, exacerbating the public health risk. For every heat-related workplace death, dozens more workers fall ill. Since 2011, the state has seen at least 42 heat-related deaths on the job, and at least 4,030 incidents of heat-related illness, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

To think about this beyond the statistics, consider the death of Roendy Granillo, age 25, a Texas construction worker who began feeling ill at work. He was ignored, told to keep working, and eventually collapsed on the job. He died at the hospital, where his body temperature was 110 degrees.

Somehow this is all connected. The planet is heating up. We just got through the hottest July in recorded history, and the reaction of (primarily) Republican politicians has been to push back against humane legal intervention, meant to protect workers and others most vulnerable to the heat wave. What do we value? Do we value life or do we value profit? If the latter is true, we’re doomed. We will ignore, not address, the looming climate disaster and other deep dangers, such as nuclear war.

Ignoring these looming disasters is a crime against humanity — whatever that means. The United Nations’ Office of Genocide Protection addresses that very question, noting that many scholars trace the root of the concept to the late 18th century, in reference to slavery and the slave trade, as well as the atrocities of European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere.

Slavery! Somehow that seems to fit into the issue. The horror of slavery — the dehumanization of millions of people — is more than just numbers. It boils down to cruelty against individuals. Denying a worker a water break, especially as the days get mercilessly hotter, sounds like some leftover cruelty from the slave era: a crime against humanity, especially when you factor in the racism.

As The Guardian points out, six out of every 10 construction workers in Texas are Latino — and Abbott’s law will hurt Black and Latino communities the most, which are already disproportionately affected by the intensifying heat.

“In the midst of a record-setting heat wave, I could not think of a worse time for this governor or any elected official, who has any, any kind of compassion, to do this,” said civil rights organizer David Cruz, quoted by The Guardian. “This administration is incrementally trying to move us backwards into a dark time in this nation. When plantation owners and agrarian mentalities prevailed.”

Water is life! Yeah, so what?

Recently, writing about the Texas border wall, I noted this: “A state trooper said he was under orders not to give migrants any water.”

And then the New York Times, writing about life in Latino border communities, known as colonias, talked about the continual water shutoffs the residents are enduring, and then, when the water comes back on, they are warned to boil it before using it. “You could not trust the water when we needed it the most, if we had it at all,” one resident said, adding: “I’m afraid to take a shower or even splash water on my face. We were told not to let water get into our eyes.”

And as her father pointed out: “You drive around the block, and you see the car washes using all of this water, but there is no water for a mother and her two children? How is that possible? It’s like the colonias are part of a different country.”

As I write these words, I take a gulp of water. I take it for granted — and I’m not writing in the hot sun. I’m cool and comfortable and the water I drink is simply refreshing. I hardly think about it as a right, or the source of life and health. But it is.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

Facing Climate Change As One World

Global warming continues unabated. (Photo: Markus Spiske | Unsplash)

“… 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 humanity’s greatest crisis, undoing the exploitative, Earth-destroying aspects of our social structure and grabbing control over the planet’s rising temperature. We need to do everything we can!

Yeah, sure. And then it turns out “we” aren’t doing nearly enough. The blame gets passed around — to the rich countries of the global north, to the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. And the ice keeps melting; the wildfires rage; average temperatures keep setting records. Scientists grow ever more distraught. The cry repeats itself: We need to do everything we can!

I don’t disagree with this. I just don’t know who “we” are, and hardly feel like a participant in the process, except in small ways: when I recycle stuff or argue with a climate-change denier or walk rather than drive wherever (achy legs, balance issues — I mostly drive). This isn’t enough, of course. It’s change from the social margins. The global warming — the global “weirding” — continues unabated, as do the warnings from the science community. National promises to change remain minimal, and are ultimately bypassed and ignored.

What I’m trying to say is this: There is a “we” that most Americans embrace and feel a part of, but it has nothing to do with the warming planet and collapsing ecosystem. Before we can begin “doing everything we can,” we have to transcend our limited sense of who we are and what matters. 

The New York Times’ Brad Plumer, for instance, writing about a report recently released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, noted: “Governments and companies would need to invest three to six times the roughly $600 billion they now spend annually on encouraging clean energy in order to hold global warming at 1.5 or 2 degrees, the report says. While there is currently enough global capital to do so, much of it is difficult for developing countries to acquire. The question of what wealthy, industrialized nations owe to poor, developing countries has been divisive at global climate negotiations.”

These words quietly scream for a fundamental shift in the planet’s political infrastructure. “Encouraging clean energy” isn’t really any nation’s first priority, especially if it’s rich and powerful. As I read that paragraph, what popped into my head is this: The planet’s annual military budget is about $2.2 trillion (with the United States accounting for nearly half of that). War is hell, but that’s okay. It’s the primary manifestation of nationalism, the primary expression of power. 

We have treaties and such — some nations are allies — but the essence of the situation is this: We live in an us-vs.-them world. We have to be continually cautious and, if necessary, aggressive. This is a divided world. Any questions?

The problem, of course, is that the divisions are mostly arbitrary, not to mention pragmatic. There’s nothing like a good enemy to help a country maintain its unity, to help a government assert control over the population. (Careful, he may be a commie.) But these arbitrary divisions are also distinct and specific; they’re called borders. Borders have nothing to do with reality, but “we” pretend that they matter — often to the detriment of people who need to cross them. And as climate change continues to create chaos, it makes certain regions uninhabitable. More and more human beings will find themselves being pushed out of the “human climate niche,” which means they’ll have to go somewhere else.

As Anju Anna John and Stefano Balbi write at Common Dreams, regarding a study called Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming: 

“In the worst-case future scenario — where the world reverts to fossil-fueled development and has a population of 9.5 billion at the end of the century — the study found that 5.3 billion people would be left behind. We would be looking at a world where about half the world’s population would no longer be able to live in regions they once considered home.”

So they’d have to move. They’d have to become climate refugees, which probably means confronting a foreign bureaucracy at some border or other. Uh oh. That could be a problem, even though, according to The Guardian: 

“… [T]he richest 1 percent of the world’s population is responsible for twice the amount of greenhouse gases as the world’s poorest 50 percent, who suffer the brunt of the harms.

“So far, the rich countries of the global north are regarded as having promised too little — and delivered even less — for climate adaptation efforts in poorer countries.”

We need to do everything we can — to minimize global warming, to deal with its inevitable effects on some. But this will only happen minimally in the context of the present moment, in which the wealthy and powerful are motivated primarily to protect and expand their wealth and power, and who will casually dehumanize those who are in the way or who attempt to cross a sacred border.

This is not the “we” that’s going to do everything it can to save the planet, but it’s the “we” we’re stuck with, at least for now. Truly dealing with climate change — doing everything we can — means transforming who we are and reorganizing ourselves as one world. 

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

National Policy Wrapped in Razor Wire

Photo: Dennis Kelly | Dreamstime

“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 something called “Operation Lone Star,” but the director isn’t John Ford; it’s Texas Governor Greg Abbott — and this is real life, as reported by USA Today. And in real life, at least 853 migrants died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the past 12 months. And God knows how many merely endured — and continue to endure — various forms of hell.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall …

The wall Robert Frost wrote about in his classic poem “Mending Wall,” published in 1914, was a hand-built stone wall separating an apple orchard from a pine forest. The narrator of the poem expressed ambivalence about walls in general — what’s their point? — and smirked when his neighbor said: “Good fences make good neighbors.” But here he was, working with his neighbor to repair it. This was an annual ritual; hunters were always knocking part of the wall down, and the winter weather — the frost — also inflicted regular damage. The wall was simply part of their lives, so every spring they put it back together.

Interestingly, the poem started claiming a spot in the national political consciousness in the early ’60s, after the Soviets constructed a wall dividing East and West Berlin. Yeah, something there is that doesn’t love a wall. The line had Cold War resonance, at least when it was directed at the communists, who were arrogantly creating a barrier that must not be crossed. Quite obviously, this was not a wall constructed by equals. It was a one-sided declaration to an enemy: Stay out. America, the good guys, told the Soviets with moral certainty: Tear down that wall. This puts the present moment, and the obsession of certain powerful Americans with “border security” (and, for God’s sake, razor wire) in an interesting context.

Consider the words of Martin Luther King, when he visited Berlin in 1964:  “It is indeed an honor to be in this city, which stands as a symbol of the divisions of men on the face of the Earth. For here on either side of the wall are God’s children and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact. Whether it be East or West, men and women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.”

I guess those are easy words to embrace when they’re directed at a declared enemy. But King’s context was a little larger than that. He told his audience of Berliners that, while he was hardly an expert in German politics, he knew about walls. I think he could very well have said the same words in El Paso or Laredo or Eagle Pass — any Texas border city. 

“For here on either side of the wall are God’s children and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact.”

Are you aware of that, Governor Abbott? 

Simple-minded and cruel governmental policies — policies wrapped in razor wire — keep no one safe. 

So am I saying that border protection is 100 percent wrong and our borders should be wide open? In my heart, yes, but I’m also aware that the matter is way more complicated than that, and the flow of refugees into a country can create complex difficulties for the current social structure, financial and otherwise. What I am saying is that the flow of refugees is a global matter — kind of on the order of climate change, not to mention war — and we … all of us … have to devote far more energy and awareness to addressing it than we have so far. Dehumanizing the refugees, then simply focusing on keeping them out, as though they were vermin, betrays an excruciating lack of moral intelligence.

And the damage is widespread, cultural and environmental. As the Center for Biological Diversity points out: “Border walls built over the past several decades along the U.S.-Mexico border are a dark stain on American history. Hundreds of miles of wall have been built through protected public lands, communities, and sovereign tribal nations. These barriers cut through sensitive ecosystems, disrupt animal migration patterns, cause catastrophic flooding, and separate families.”

And a diverse array of endangered and rare species is threatened by our militarized protection of an imaginary line, including, as the center notes: “Sonoran pronghorns, lesser long-nosed bats, Quino checkerspot butterflies, cactus ferruginous pygmy owls, and larger predators like jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, and ocelots …”

The “border problem” cannot be resolved by minimizing our connection to all of humanity and all of the natural world. What we call government is our collective identity. It’s more than just bureaucracy. It’s more than just rules and guns and razor wire. And now is the time for it to wake up, but this will only happen if we demand that it expand its awareness … expand its sense of empathy. This is the only way it can “protect” us from our self-created problems. 

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

Listening to Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer (Photo: Department of Energy, Office of Public Affairs, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons)

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 the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies — our former allies — were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon. Hello, H-bomb!

War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?

Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita entered his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

He had not opposed dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as some of the Manhattan Project scientists, such as Leo Szilard, did, but when the war ended he became deeply committed to eliminating all possibility of future wars. One of the first actions he took, a week after the bombings, was to write a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging him to embrace common sense regarding further development of nuclear weapons.

“We believe,” he wrote, “that the safety of this nation — as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power — cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.”

Making future wars impossible! What if American political forces had sufficient sanity to listen to Oppenheimer? Several months after writing this letter, he paid a visit to President Truman, attempting to discuss the placement of international control over further nuclear development. The president would have none of that. He kicked Oppenheimer out of the Oval Office.

Oppenheimer maintained his commitment to the transcendence of war, working with the Atomic Energy Commission to control the use of nuclear weapons — and standing firm in his opposition to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. He continued his opposition even as the bomb’s development progressed and nuclear tests began spreading fallout over “expendable” parts of the world. But, uh oh. Along came the McCarthy era and the accompanying Red Scare. And in 1954, after 19 days of secret hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance. As the New York Times noted, this “brought his career to a humiliating end. Until then a hero of American science, he lived out his life a broken man.” He died at age 62 in 1967.

“A key element in the case against Oppenheimer,” the Times reported, “was derived from his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb, which could explode with 1,000 times the force of an atomic bomb. The physicist Edward Teller had long advocated a crash program to devise such a weapon, and told the 1954 hearing that he mistrusted Oppenheimer’s judgment. ‘I would feel personally more secure,’ he testified, ‘if public matters would rest in other hands.’”

But of course the “black mark of shame” that remained stuck to Oppenheimer for the rest of his life was that he was a commie, and maybe a spy — in other words, totally anti-American. This was the basic lie used against those who challenged the tenets of the Cold War. The commission’s secret hearings remained classified for 60 years. After they were declassified in 2014, historians expressed amazement that they contained virtually no damning evidence of any sort against Oppenheimer, and lots of testimony sympathetic to him. The revelations here seem primarily to expose the government’s interest in covering its own lies.

It was this past December that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, chairman of the department that the Atomic Energy Commission had morphed into, nullified the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, declaring the 1954 hearing a “flawed process.” Getting the government to undo its wrong was a long, arduous process, embarked on by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It took them about 16 years. They finally succeeded in clearing his name.

And while I applaud their enormous effort and its result, I also note it isn’t finished yet. This is more than simply a personal matter: the righting of a bureaucratic wrong done to one man. The future of humanity remains at stake. The U.S. government has spent multi-trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons development over the years, conducted a thousand-plus nuclear tests, and is currently in possession of 5,244 nuclear warheads, out of an insane global total of some 12,500. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to — and hearing — Oppenheimer’s words.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

It’s Time to Stop the ‘Insect Apocalypse’

Commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature. (Photo: Dmitry Grigoriev | Unsplash)

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 process, fooled ourselves into thinking that technology has allowed us to recreate the Garden of Eden from which we’d been banned. You might call it the Garden of Capitalism, in which humans can take what they want without consequences, forever and ever and ever. This seems to be the myth at the core of dominant global culture.

But of course there are consequences, which we officially refuse to let ourselves see. For instance, Amy van Saun, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, writing about the shocking disappearance of bees and other pollinators of much of the food we eat (fruit, vegetables, nuts), notes that one of the primary causes is the ever-increasing use of pesticides, in particular, something called neonicotinoids (or “neonics”), which wreak their own special hell on the planet’s ecosystems.

Neonicotinoids “are the most widely used insecticides in the world,” she writes. “Unlike traditional pesticides, which are typically applied to plant surfaces, neonics … are absorbed and transported through all parts of the plant tissue.

“… Modeled after nicotine, neonicotinoids interfere with insects’ nervous systems, causing tremors, paralysis, and eventually, death. Neonicotinoids are so toxic that one corn seed treated with them contains enough insecticide to kill over 80,000 honey bees.”

And, like cluster bombs, land mines, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, “they persist in the environment,” almost as though — forgive the analogy — commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature.

If neonics are so dangerous, what is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doing about it? Not very much, as it turns out, despite scientific evidence of its danger, which is why Center for Food Safety, along with the Pesticide Action Network North America, is suing the agency. As van Saun writes, “almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds,” but the agency refuses to regulate them.

The result, according to a U.N. report, is that cropland is approximately 50 times more toxic than it was a quarter of a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century, and the world is currently experiencing an “insect apocalypse.”

And indeed, it begins to appear that the EPA has a mission that transcends “environmental protection.” It may well be that this agency — part of a governmental culture that supports and benefits from wealth and war — has a mission that is more about official denial of the dangers of planetary exploitation. The EPA’s refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by neonics is just a small part of it.

“Critics accuse the EPA of being inappropriately cozy with the pesticide industry, and biasing its decisions to favor companies selling pesticides,” The Guardian writes. “Several EPA scientists came forward last year, publicly alleging that EPA management routinely pressures EPA scientists to tamper with risk assessments of chemicals in ways that downplayed the harm the chemicals could pose.

“… The scientists complained, among other things, that key managers move back and forth between industry jobs and positions at the EPA.”

This is when I started hearing an alarm go off in my head: Cultural malfunction alert! Cultural malfunction alert! This is what things look like when exploitation prevails: when grabbing all the goodies you can is at the cultural core, rather than something a bit more complex, such as understanding — and revering — the eco-reality (also known as nature) in which we live.

And beyond that, can we not create a culture that faces the paradoxes of life with a certain level of openness and a continued interest in learning? Life is not something to be reduced to simplistic opposites: win vs. lose, good vs. evil. There is darkness within all of us, but we can’t let it determine our fate or shape our understanding of the world. Yet I fear this is the nature of “modern,” as opposed to Indigenous, culture.

Humanity, over the past few millennia, has moved its sense of reverence away from Mother Earth and essentially to Father Sky, rather than continuing to revere both. As a result, Mother Earth is ours to do with as we choose.

The opposite viewpoint — apparently the Indigenous viewpoint, which European land-grabbers called “savage” — isn’t quite so simple. The natural world, while rife with struggle, can’t be reduced to “survival of the fittest.” Rather, it exists in a state of complex cooperation among all concerned — plants, animals — and evolves via the interdependence of all life.

As Rupert Ross wrote in his remarkable book about Indigenous culture, Returning to the Teachings: “The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest … waste … weed.”

Back to pesticides then. Back to weed killers. Back to climate change and the apparent inability of the polluters who purport to be in charge of Planet Earth to address it adequately: Superficial change won’t do it. The change has to be cultural. It has to be spiritual.

Believe me, if we fail to change who we are and the bees — the pollinators — disappear, we’ll all feel the sting.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.