By Robert C. Koehler

Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again – making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority.

This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior to the changes the movement wrought – I’m old enough to remember those days – polite ladies at church could say, “Oh my, that’s very white of you.” And lynchings were not only normal but quasi-legal, or so it seemed, far more likely to result in postcards than convictions.

Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is. Dehumanizing a particular group of people – turning them into “the enemy” of the moment – is such a useful governing tool. And creating the enemy isn’t limited to waging war.

America, America! Half democracy, half slave-owning autocracy: God bless our founding racism, Let’s make America as great as it used to be. Here’s how this is done, as Axios reports:

“In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day . . . according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

“Why it matters: The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term — and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.”

No wonder ICE agents seem like such brutal racists. It’s their job. Perhaps most of them believe in the moral necessity of their work – getting “illegals” out of the country, even if, oh gosh, they’re here legally. But even if they don’t. this is the work they have to do.

It’s not too difficult to scrape past the superficial terms “legal” and “citizenship” to spot the collective dehumanization of brown people. Americans capable of understanding life only in us-vs.-them – me-vs.-you – terms are getting what they long for.

This was exemplified in a recent CNN story about a surge in arrests of fake ICE agents – ordinary American guys harassing, assaulting and/or pretending to arrest brown people. One incident, in which a South Carolina white guy stopped his car on a rural road, blocking the car of brown men behind him. One of the victims recorded the incident on his cellphone.

“You all got caught!” the fake agent blathered. “Where are you from, Mexico? You from Mexico? You’re going back to Mexico!”

He then grabbed the keys from the ignition and started jiggling them in the driver’s face as he mocked his accent. One of the passengers made a call on his cellphone, causing the fake agent to admonish him: “Now don’t be speaking that pig-Latin in my fucking country!” He then slapped the phone out of his hand,

Ah, the enemy! What the incident makes public is not simply the sense of fear the Trumpers are instilling in ordinary Americans, but the fact that they’re returning those ordinary Americans to a sense of . . . uh, self-worth. We’re better than they are.

But of course this creates fear among everyone in the group declared to be non-American: “the enemy.” As Maribel Hernández Rivera of the American Civil Liberties Union noted to CNN after watching the video:

“What we’re seeing here is we have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing. You end up having a violation of people’s rights, people see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.”

Yes, this is part of who we are. Us-vs.-them hatred, fear and contempt is basic humanity, simplified to its lowest common denominator. It’s so easy to seize a sense of hatred and contempt for an “other” – for someone who seems different. But to worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself. You’re living as half of who you are, locked solely in your certainties – in what you know or think you know – and denying yourself the chance to learn and grow. What someone prone to racism really fears isn’t “the other” – he may well worship having a clearly defined enemy – but, rather, life’s complexity: the unknown.

Removing books from libraries is one example of this – you know, books that make people “uncomfortable,” because they push them beyond their certainties (racist or otherwise). So is the Trump-ICE invasion of universities: arresting and deporting students who make, let us say, politically incorrect statements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As author Christine Greer asked: “What is the point of a university if we have homogeneity of thought and silence?”

Interestingly, we’re also witnessing a seemingly opposite sort of educational confrontation, as Trump education secretary Linda McMahon recently defended a New York state high school’s right to maintain an indigenous American name for its sports teams: “the Chiefs.” The state had imposed a ban on stereotypical mascot names. As a spokesperson for the National Congress of American Indians said: “These depictions are not tributes — they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”

No matter! America has a right to maintain its stereotypes, that is to say, keep them in public view, front and center. Toss in a few hoots while you’re at it.

I believe this much: We’ll continue to evolve beyond this smirking certainty, regardless how difficult it will be to do so and regardless how long it takes.

By Robert C. Koehler

The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians – dead children – are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.

How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.

And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media . . . genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:

“Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.

“Hours later, the bodies of seven children – most of them badly burned – arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home. . . . The bodies of two more of her children – a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead – remain missing.

“Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.”

This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves – in all their vulnerable humanity – with the organization’s founding purpose.

A letter the fasters wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the UN founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”

I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war – beginning with an Israeli ceasefire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.

To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.

One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.

The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.

Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old’ Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.

Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.

So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost nine of her ten children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that “Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.

“She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.”

“Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.”

And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”

This is peace – this is love – standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.

By Robert C. Koehler

What does mowing the lawn have to do with world events?

Well, one of my life skills is the ability to make minimal and possibly absurd connections, linking the trivial and the profound. Thus, a few years back (when I still mowed my own lawn), I wrote this poem. It’s called “Buddha’s Lawn”:

I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?

You know, value everything, including the disposables of life. I guess I’ve always had this wacky inner protest going on, not against order and cleanliness per se, but against the clank of the trash can: “throwing stuff away,” then assuming it’s permanently gone from our universe, rather than floating in a river somewhere or buried in a landfill.

Is it possible, I quietly (secretly) ask myself, to actually value . . . somehow . . . trash, weeds, mice, bugs or anything – everything – else that doesn’t fit into a properly civilized, middle-class universe? This secret question is mixed with confusion, even shame, because, well, I’m sort of a slob, indifferent to dust and disorder and the like, but also, at the same time, a participant in and benefactor of humanity’s exploitation of Planet Earth.

So, I tell myself: just mow the damn lawn, toss out (or maybe recycle) the litter and do your best to fit in. I try, I try, but my strange, soul-deep uncertainty persists. And a larger, far more troubling question quickly emerges. Where do we draw the line between valuing and dismissing . . . whatever?

And my uncertainties turn social. They turn political. I grew up in the Christian church, and heard its values espoused: “Do unto others as you would have them do un o you.” And, oh yeah: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,”

Could anything resonate more clearly? This was deep, unyielding: Don’t submit to simplistic anger but dig, when you are hurt and offended, for understanding, for healing. Love is not a simple concept – a sploosh of kumbaya and the problem’s solved. It may well be life’s deepest challenge.

But as Christianity became a world religion, its cross got turned upside down and became a sword. And along came the Crusades. Let’s retake the Holy Land, man! Loving thy enemy apparently meant killing him – and his family, his children. Millions of people died. And the wars rolled on and on. Conquest and dehumanization became fully embedded as the religious values of the powerful. Human ingenuity – scientific progress – mostly fed the urge for war, culminating in the creation, and use, of the atomic bomb. And 12,000 or so nuclear bombs now sit here and there around the planet, continually upgraded, patiently waiting to end the world.

But even as ending the world remains on hold, non-nuclear wars continue, making the news virtually unbearable to read. For instance, over 50,000 Palestinians, — maybe 100,000 or more – have died in Israel’s genocidal assault.

And, as Truthout reports: “Many Palestinians say that the starvation is even worse than Israel’s bombardments, having been starved by varying levels of Israel’s blockade for 19 months and with food costs constantly on the rise. The total aid blockade ushered in the worst conditions of the genocide so far; one Palestinian reporter said in March that children in the region are so hungry that they’re drawing pictures of food in the sand.

“ . . .. According to an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children are expected to experience acute malnutrition in the next year due to Israel’s blockade.”

This is humanity’s flow of indifference to much – or all? – of life. I can’t let go of it. And I can’t stop noticing it at the miniscule level of “weeds” and “litter” and every other aspect of nature that doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is not, oh gosh, be good to the weeds, be good to the discarded cigarette butts and plastic straws – but rather, notice them and ponder, with deep wonderment, the meaning of nature, the meaning of life.

What if we started collectively seeing that discarded plastic straw not as simply an assault on our sense of order – clean sidewalks! – but as a minute particle of the living planet? How far upwards might this awareness flow?

By Robert C. Koehler

“Do you believe in them yet?”

Well, do you? Do I?

I tear these words loose from my not-so-recent past – indeed, 27 years ago – when my wife was dying of pancreatic cancer. I think they mean something, but God knows what. I plunked that question in my journal on May 3, 1998, three days before she died. I wrote:

“That was Barbara’s mystical question to me at 6:45 AM. Oh Lord – I’m down in the quiet dining room at 11 PM. I just kissed my daughter goodnight. She’s upstairs in the bed with Barbara. ‘Should I put my arms around her?’?

My daughter, Alison, was then 11 years old. She was about to lose her mother. These days never go away, of course, but recently –as the anniversary of her death rolls past – I’ve been feeling a glaring desire to return to that time of our lives. This is partly because of the global news. It’s full of war, poverty, starvation and death, as much now as ever. And all of it is abstract.

What I’m feeling right now is an intense sense that everyone’s life matters, in a deeply specific and individual way. So I’m bringing some memories of Barbara into the present moment, memories of what losing her meant and how it felt – the depth of soul it opened – because doing so feels necessary. “

“Do you believe in them yet?”

I have no idea what she meant when she asked me this question, several days before her passing. Neither of us were religious. We had no certainties about the great beyond – but our souls were open . . . to whatever.

So I return to those aging memories, which I was able to start penning into my journal several weeks later. For instance, here I am at her bedside, in the last hours of her life:

The feel of her hand. Moist, cool. Incredibly beautiful music by Mahler. A little after 3 p.m. – there’s a cloudburst. My neighbor’s red maple, which I can see out the bedroom window, is swept with wind and rain. And I am sitting there holding Barbara’s hand and I realize the next breath is not going to come. For the past hour, there had been an amazing change in her breathing – stop and start. a breath pushes through, then no breathing at all. But my sweetheart is at peace. Her face is no longer distressing to look at. That’s how it goes for the whole hour. Breath. Stillness. Breath. But then the rain comes and there is only stillness.

“I think she’s gone.” I tell the news to Pearl, Debby and Lauretta (mom, sister, cousin, who are downstairs). There are great, heaving, broken sobs as I hug Pearl.

Alison’s arrives. She was at school. When it became clear her mom had very little time left, my sister and brother-in-law drove to the school and picked her up. She got there within minutes of Barbara’s final breath. She wishes she had been able to give Mom her Mother’s Day presents and quickly retrieves them from her room: bath oil and powder. She puts them in Barbara’s arms. The hospice people take them out along with the body.

I hold Alison as we cry. “I don’t want to be with anyone but you,” she says.

I begin making phone calls. I call our friend Chris, who vividly remembers the moment it started raining – the moment of Barbara’s passing. She and her 5-year-old daughter Becky, had been out driving at the time of the cloudburst and Becky, who loved Barbara and called Barbara her “second mom,” became suddenly silent. “Oh, somebody’s having a baby!” she said, then got a very serious look on her face. She told her mom: “I think Barbara’s having a baby.”

Another mystical swoop. No further details. Becky simply said it; she didn’t know why. But it happened at the moment of Barbara’s death and has remained, for me, a stunning whisper from the unknown, a fleeting . . . truth? Death and birth are somehow connected? Oh my God. What if? What would that change?

I draw no “aha!” certainty from this story, no clear sense of larger awareness: Oh, now I get how the universe works. This is just a flicker of maybe – maybe we know almost nothing about the universe in which we live. As I’ve written previously: “I keep the story in my heart. I do not ask it to bloom beyond itself. But I keep it as a talisman, a tiny fragment of the infinite unknown that has fallen into my life. There’s more to this thing called life than we can possibly understand, but there are clues. And there is hope.”

It helps me continue to value my wife’s life in the present moment, a quarter century after her death. She’s still with us. And so is everyone else.

Do you believe in them yet?

By Robert C. Koehler

As Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants – “the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized – much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on.

The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him), he’s above the law! Court rulings don’t apply to him – not when he’s busy keeping America safe from the boogeymen. To be an exalted leader, you need to keep a serious percentage of the populace in a state of simple-minded fear: The enemy are very, very bad people. They belong to gangs. They eat our pets. But I will protect you.

I’ll reopen Guantanamo. I’ll reopen Alcatraz. And the electorate can sigh with a sense of relief and safety. He’s bringing back our greatness – that is to say, our racist certainty. He’s recreating a country that real Americans can understand . . . one that’s like them.

At least this is how it seems. But before I get too deeply immersed in Trump-inspired sarcasm, let me grapple with some deeper reality as well. American “greatness” has primarily been military in nature: us vs. somebody! The nation’s mainstream consciousness, be it Democratic or Republican, cannot stop playing war. At least this has been the case throughout my lifetime.

As Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out at Huffington Post, for instance, the Bush-era war on terror helped give birth to Trump’s war on migrants: today’s terrorists, the “invaders” of the present moment. They quote J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented Gitmo detainees under Bush. He notes that Trump’s initial plan to open Gitmo was “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law. It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”

However, to Trump’s frustration, there was “too much rule of law” at Gitmo, making matters too difficult to turn the hellish site into a dumping ground for thousands of migrants. Trump’s waging war! The last thing he needs is rule of law. So his next step was to work out an agreement with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, allegedly paying El Salvador some $6 million to send American migrants to the country’s maximum-security hellhole, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. This would allow Trump’s war to continue.

As Schulberg and Blumenthal write: “On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had ‘invaded’ the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.”

Some good – or at least hopeful – news from all this is that the opposition to Trump’s war-gaming isn’t sheerly marginal. The opposition is also politically structural, such as, for instance the existence of sanctuary cities – whose governments refuse to cooperate, or allow their police departments to cooperate, with ICE, despite the risks they face for doing so.

For instance, a few days ago, the Trump administration sued Colorado and the city of Denver “for allegedly,” according to Truthout, “obstructing federal immigration enforcement. The suit objects to sanctuary policies — local initiatives to protect immigrant communities from federal deportation efforts — and argues that such policies encroach on federal authority.

“This move follows Donald Trump’s recent executive order instructing the DOJ to penalize sanctuary cities, including threatening to withhold federal funding.”

Obviously, this is no small challenge to face. Maybe Trump will wind up succeeding with his authoritarian agenda – God help the migrants, God help all so us – and if that happens, humanitarian opposition will have to continue nonetheless, no matter how difficult things get. But opposition is also present right now. So is political belief in a higher value than waging war and defeating an “enemy.”

In response to the federal lawsuit against Denver, a statement from the mayor’s office declared that the city “will not be bullied or blackmailed, least of all by an administration that has little regard for the law and even less for the truth.”

This is not simply an “us vs. them” confrontation between the Trump-MAGA world and progressives. The confrontation is both pragmatic and spiritual: What keeps us safe? Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz – depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life – will not keep us safe. What we must embrace and learn to understand, both individually and collectively, is what I call empathic sanity: the ability to live as one, to value everyone’s full humanity.

Turns out there are more than 200 sanctuary cities in the United States. As George Cassidy Payne writes at Medium, a sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. All people are equal.

“In this context,” he writes, “sanctuary cities offer more than a geographical claim. They challenge us to look past a person’s nationality and recognize their humanity. They call us to prioritize their place of residence, viewing them as global citizens, not by their place of birth. In the sanctuary, people are treated with radical respect; here, no one has the right to harm another without their consent, nor to judge anyone based on their skin color, accent, citizenship status, or nation of origin.”

This sounds like a first step in the creation of international security.

By Robert C. Koehler

Forty years.

That’s how long I’ve been here – quietly bonding with this old house, becoming it, you might say, as I clunk up the stairs every day with a cup of coffee and plop down in front of my computer.

My wife and I had been married two years when we bought the place. For the previous year we’d been trying unsuccessfully to make a baby; but she got pregnant maybe a month after we moved in. We raised our daughter here, trekking joyfully through childhood with her. When she was 11, my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She died here, in our bedroom, seven months later.

This old house. Oh my God. That was twenty-five years ago now. This is the basic context in which I now sit in my study, thinking about not simply the house but my whole life. I don’t know how to separate them. Nevertheless . . .

Ain’t gonna need this house no longer
Ain’t gonna need this house no more
Ain’t got time to fix the shingles
Ain’t got time to fix the floor
Ain’t got time to oil the hinges
Nor to mend the window-pane
Ain’t gonna need this house no longer
I’m gettin’ ready to meet the saints

Well, I’ll hold off on “meeting the saints” for a while, but otherwise that old song kinda hits it. I’ve decided, with the encouragement of family members, to sell the house – or, from my perspective, leap feet-first into the emotional chaos of putting the house on the market (not immediately, but, uh, soon, soon). I’m no longer at ease walking – stumbling – up the stairs, thanks to arthritis in my knees. And the house needs a lot of work. And it’s a mess, full of the past – packed with (to put it vaguely) stuff.

Need any stuff? Let me know. I’ve got plenty.

Some of it is stuff I’m aware of and value – like copies of twelve hundred columns, a hundred and eight-four journal volumes, a bunch of life-changing books (the ones I still remember) and much, much more. But the punch-in-the-nose of the present moment, which I can no longer avoid facing, is all the stuff packed away in rooms I now rarely enter. As I say, I’ve been here forty years. There’s a fair amount of history here that I have intentionally stopped thinking about. But step one in selling the house is clearing out the chaos.

And this is where the process has instantly started getting crazy, as I look through old bags and boxes (mostly with my sister, who came to town to help me – actually, to get me started). Where did all this stuff come from? What should I just throw away and what should I donate?

Here are two boxes full of ‘60s era (and earlier) record albums. I’m stunned. Ancient albums, from Bach and Beethoven to Pavarotti to Leonard Bernstein to “My Fair Lady.” Oh, holy cow, here’s Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Aurplane (“White Rabbit,” “Somebody to Love”). Tom Paton, Bukka White, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen – vinyl records. Now I want to spend all day listening to them, but “record players’ don’t exist anymore. These discs might as well be relics from the Middle Ages – stacked and forgotten in my old house.

And there’s so much more: Here’s a box of stuff I no doubt rescued from my mom’s house after her death in 1983. It’s full of old newspaper front pages, dating back to, wow, World War I. “LUSITANIA TORPEDOED; ALL RESCUED.” This is dated May 7, 1915. “CHICAGO GANG TRAPPED AND EXECUTED BY RIVALS” – Feb. 14, 1929. This is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “PARIS FALLS! PATRIOTS DRIVE OUT NAZIS IN 4-DAY BATTLE.” And then, on Oct, 4, 1946 (when I was not quite two months old): GOERING TO HANG.

I’m sure I had never stared at those headlines before. And look, here’s something called “Basic Field Manual and Soldier’s Handbook” – it was my dad’s, obviously. He served in World War II. Tucked into the manual is a small War Department brochure called “Sex Hygiene and Venereal Disease.” Careful, men! The brochure warns: “All soldiers should clearly understand that every woman who is loose is likely to be diseased, whether she takes money for her services or not.”

And this is just the minutiae. All those books! All the jackets and coats and clothing. Just throw them out? No, no, no – some of this is in good shape, still wearable. Donate, donate – but it has to be cleaned first. Boxes of CDs. Boxes of electronic equipment. An ancient Apple computer. Where did that come from?

And all of this is jammed in various storage rooms, amid old couches and dressers. There’s an old television set on the back porch that needs to be tossed out but is way too big for me to handle on my own, plus the porch steps are broken. And then there’s that piano – moved here from Mom’s house. It was for our daughter to take piano lessons, but after she no longer wanted to, it just sat there, pushing my frustration button every time I thought about it. I managed never to succeed at giving it away.

More, more, more. But moving out the unwanted stuff is just part one of this process. I have to get at least some repairs made – like fixing that hole in the roof. And eventually, I must also move out . . . myself.

Where would I go? I have loving family in Wisconsin. Should I go there? But I love Chicago – should I stay here? And if I do, should I consider a “senior citizen” place or some other living situation? An apartment” A condo? For some reason this feels beyond me. I haven’t made peace yet with the idea of exiting the last forty years of my life – surrounded by my books, my file cabinets, the miscellany I may ignore but nonetheless feel connected to.

This is unprecedented for me, more fully unprecedented than any other period of change I can remember living through. The word “yikes” just never stops echoing in my soul.

By Robert C. Koehler

Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision.

We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving circle of life, which we are still trying to understand. And we can only understand it if we also value it, ever so deeply. Earth Day is also Love Day.

Oh God, let it flow beyond the invisible borders we have created. To that end, I call forth the late Pope Francis, who died two days ago as I write – a day before Earth Day 2025. He was 88. Unlike most world leaders, he saw the need to transcend the present worldview – including religion – that currently holds the planet hostage.

As Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado professor and contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, noted recently in a Democracy Now interview, Pope Francis was insistent on linking major political issues, such as protecting the planet’s ecosystem and halting the war on migrants. “Justice for both,” Schneider said. We must “counter the idea of disposability.”

This is a cry from the depths of our soul. Value the planet. Value all of humanity. We have to reach beyond the world we think we know and, as the pope put it, according to Schneider, “learn from the periphery.”

The migrant crisis and the climate crisis are intertwined. The pope “called for solidarity across borders. He called for taking down the idols of our world – the things that we think are real that really aren’t: borders created with imaginary lines.”

That is to say: Tear down that wall, this is a wall we’ve built in our own hearts. Planet Earth is a single entity; our complex differences are interrelated. Yes, conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is never the answer. Yes, this is an inconvenience for those in power – and for those who want, and feel entitled, to use up the planet for personal gain. Humanity, as Pope Francis understood, is at an extraordinary transition point: beyond exploitation.

As Cynthia Kaufman writes: “The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function. . . .

“Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.”

Principles of solidarity? This is a huge leap for the part of humanity that assumes itself to be in control of the future. Kaufman is not talking about an alliance of good guys against bad guys, but solidarity in a total way: solidarity with the planet and its extraordinarily complex ecosystem. “Solidarity” values continuous learning, understanding and protecting, not simply controlling. That is to say: environmental stewardship.

According to the Earthday website: “It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous people, despite making up just 5 percent of the global population, protect a significant amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a term for the collective Indigenous knowledge and beliefs about nature and man’s place in it, and serves as an alternative to the more objective and resource-oriented Western worldview of the environment as something to be exploited.”

I would put it this way: Planet Earth has a soul.

I say this in a non-religious way, without a sense of explanatory understanding, just a sense of wonder. The planet itself is alive. And life itself should be what we value most, not . . . money (the invisible god).

As Earthday notes: “Like the Maōri, many Indigenous communities consider themselves ‘guardians’ of their local environmental resources.

“Within the 2.7 million square miles of the Amazon Rainforest, there are approximately 400 distinct tribes which call the rainforest home. The Guajajara tribe, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are particularly known for their fierce protection of their local forests from illegal loggers, and continue to risk their lives daily for their home.”

Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible god who holds us hostage. I don’t say this with a simple shrug but, rather, without knowing how this will happen – just that it must. The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity . . . with one another, with all of life. This is what I have called empathic sanity. Real change is impossible without it.

From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us , , , welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded, white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values – e.g., the Declaration of Independence – that keep disrupting the way things are supposed to be.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .”

Cone on! In Trump America, those words were never meant to be taken literally. They create a sense of what I call empathic sanity, which has led to, for instance, the civil rights movement. But as Donald Trump understands, empathic sanity can’t compete politically with hatred and fear – the creation of some good, solid enemies – especially when mainstream Democrats, in their desperation for financial backing, are more than willing to shrug and minimize their values in the name of compromise.

Trump, on the other hand, snorts at compromise, at least publicly, and pushes the agenda that works politically. He’ll do so even in defiance, for instance, of the Supreme Court, which recently demanded the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the hellhole prison in El Salvador to which he was sent without trial, without charges, without any chance to plead innocence. Garcia is a legal U.S. resident (father of three children who are U.S. citizens, husband of a U.S. citizen) and didn’t commit a crime, but he was snatched by ICE agents out of the blue and sent to a foreign prison. Team Trump has ignored the court’s demand for Garcia’s return, declaring that his deportation was an act of “foreign policy” – which they can conduct free of oversight.

This is all about clearing the country of enemies: of non-whites. Call them terrorists, call them criminals – dehumanize them – and then deport them. In Trump America, this is foreign policy. Millions of Americans are now in fear of deportation – for expressing the wrong political opinion (stop bombing Gaza), for simply being the wrong color.

And as Thom Hartmann pointed out, Trump is planning to up the ante. His team could start going after “you and me” – U.S. citizens who simply annoy him politically. Hartmann quotes Trump, in conversation with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele: “Home grown criminals. Home growns are next.”

And he adds, referring to the prison where Garcia was sent (the U.S. pays El Salvador for its use as a human dumping ground): “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Trump as a looming Hitler? Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the current state of America, but in the present moment the primary issue is the full-on return of racism. As Clarence Lusane writes in The Nation:

“There is a straight line from the 2017 ‘unite the right’ rallies in Charlottesville to the far-right-led ‘Stop the Steal’ movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president.”

Trump, Lusane notes, is the nation’s “white nationalist in chief.” His actions three months into his second term range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico (what was it again . . . Gulf of Some Country a Little Further North) to “re-renaming” military bases after Confederate generals to shutting down all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs to stopping “the expanding population of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the United States.”

Indeed, Lusane writes: “The second coming of Trump will be one long slog through the bowels of racial animus and juvenile reprisals. Permanent resistance is the way forward.”

Permanent resistance is certainly necessary, but as I think about what this means, I return to the concept of empathic sanity – that is to say, valuing all of humanity and working to create a world that works for everybody. There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump” – fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.

What might this mean? Here’s one example, from Jewish Voice for Peace, regarding a rally a number of organizations held recently – on Passover – in New York City. Common Dreams quotes the organization’s social media post about it:

“We are outside Federal Plaza to say: Stop arming Israel. End Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Free political prisoners held by ICE. Stop the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and students.”

They chanted for peace in all directions: “None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free.”

Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Jay Saper, whose great uncle had been at Auschwitz, put it this way: “This Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we cannot celebrate as usual while Palestinians in Gaza face famine and the U.S.-backed Israeli government uses starvation as a weapon of war.

“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical: It calls us to strengthen our commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people. We commend the courageous students and all people of conscience raising their voices in dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.”

“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical”: That hits the heart of it. No real values are theoretical. If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments. This is not a simplistic cry. It forces us to grope for understanding that lies well beyond the borders we have set for ourselves.

By Robert C. Koehler

I need some help here. The Trump presidency and the “America only” future he’s hawking to the public like the world’s most arrogant snake-oil salesman feels beyond my ability to address right now, even though I consider doing so my life’s work.

But sometimes the news of the day simply feels too absurd, too strange, to seriously address, like Trump’s comment the other day as he sat next to Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House: “You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate.”

Dividing the world into abstract chunks of real estate! This is lethal blather, without which war would be too complex to wage. First you have to sell the concept to the public, then do whatever is necessary – murder-wise – to claim the real estate itself

Meanwhile, life goes on in minuscule bits for the average person, who is unaffected by (but perhaps in favor of) this war or that war or that war. The minutiae of life – my life, your life – goes on. Sometimes I take it upon myself to notice it. Or even learn from it – dig for the soul and spirit of the universe within it. To that end I welcome “The Cardinal,” a poem I wrote several years ago, in honor of everything that doesn’t matter.

I thank you god
if that’s your name
for the beauty and the trash,
the spill, the vomit, the love and
exhaust smoke of
this new most
amazing day.
Outside my window
a cardinal shocking
as a nosebleed
pecks the raw winter
ground beneath its feet.
I thank you for its
food and mine,
for my coffee and for these
words, these malleable
playthings of awareness,
which still birth
all I think and know.
Let them stroke
the trembling potential
of what I see and what’s
to come.
The cardinal lifts.
I salute it with
my cup
and swallow.

In honor of the cardinal, let me ask: What if he “mattered” – to organized human consciousness, to the global power structure that purports to control the future? What if we valued minutiae –that is to say, basic existence, the actual world we live in – in a way that transcended our valuing of power, dominance, ownership and control? What if humanity, Planet Earth’s organizers in chief, could push their own evolution beyond exploitation of the planet to . . . God knows what?

What if those with power actually valued those without power, which includes Planet Earth itself?

Sorry, but here’s more President Trump, continuing to muse about Palestine: “Having a peace force like the United States there, controlling and owning the Gaza Strip would be a good thing, because right now all it is for years and years, all I hear about is killing and Hamas and problems.

“If you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries – and you have plenty of countries that will do that . . . you call it the Freedom Zone, a free zone, where people aren’t going to be killed every day. That’s a hell of a place.”

Yeah, an “incredible piece of important real estate” shouldn’t have genocide going on. But the cause of the genocide is the victims themselves, apparently, so we just have to move them to wherever. Maybe they’re physically, historically and spiritually connected to that land, which they call “home,” but in Trump World this is real estate – so, sorry, genocide victims, you’ll have to move. The issue here is money.

Pssst . . . don’t tell anyone, but this is the god we worship, fervently and thoughtlessly.

All if which leaves me feeling as lost as I did when I started this column. As I try to honor the minutiae of real life, I realize that also includes Donald Trump and all world leaders, or at least their flawed humanity, as well as earthworms and cardinals, sunlight, sky, rain and snow and everything else I can see beyond my kitchen window. What does it mean that we live in a world that includes both generosity and greed, both love and genocide? Knowing this, how do we proceed?

Slowly, I’d say, and with minimal certainty; the paradox is within all of us. The best we can do is keep our eyes and hearts wide open.

By Robert C. Koehler

As I stumble into my later years, I seem to know less and less. And I find myself – often in desperation – pulling what I think of as my childhood rabbit out of its hat. That is to say, when the conversation seems to be drifting away from me and I’m starting to feel out of it, I find myself turning to what I know best: dumb-ass humor.

For instance, at the bank the other day, my daughter and I were discussing significant financial matters. At one point, the banker asked: “Do you have any questions?”

Uh oh! I almost couldn’t help myself. I responded: “What’s the meaning of life?”

Hey, I got a laugh. The conversation went on. Life went on. But what is the meaning of life? I guess I’ll have to try to answer it myself, not that I have any clue whatsoever. The best I can do is toss in a little of my own poetry, just because poetry, like humor, shatters the certainties of life: breaks the glass, you might say, and in doing so expands our awareness beyond what we think we know.

How about this one? It’s called “The Divine Truth of Broke”:

Before I die
maybe I’ll go bankrupt.
This is not on my
bucket list, but
I have only so much
salve left
in my savings account
for the monthly wounds that
keep getting bigger.
Who am I not to
deserve learning
the divine truth of
broke?
Money bites
when it’s not in the room.

Financial uncertainty goes hand in hand with financial certainty. That is to say, money rules, whether you’re Elon Musk or a homeless guy living on the street. Poetry doesn’t exactly change that, but it cries out, “The emperor has no clothes.” OK, so what? He’s still the emperor. But somehow that larger awareness matters; without it we couldn’t evolve.

How about simply being awake? As we wake up and get dressed, we also put on our certainties about the nature of our lives. More certainties to shatter! Doing so doesn’t necessarily change anything, but it cracks open the door of awareness just a little bit further. Thus I wrote this one: “Time To Dream”:

I lie quietly nestled
in the soft now of heartbeat and breath,
of being, of letting go.
The day undoes itself,
boundaries melt,
sleep slowly tickles
the edges of my knowing
and my neurons dance.
I open
the coloring book of my soul.

I’ve always been swept with a sense of awe by my . . . not simply my “ability” to dream but my psycho-spiritual insistence of doing so. This is what we do without trying, at least when we’re in a state of unconsciousness, also known as sleep. Indeed, dreaming is the antithesis of consciousness – sometimes, you might say, its court jester, often turning our conscious certainties upside down.

The ability to dream in a state of consciousness is essentially what writing is, at least as I understand, and practice, it. Finding your own voice! That’s always been my core principle when I’ve taught writing over the years (from elementary school through college). Our voice comes from a place deeper than what we know, just as dreaming does, pulling from God knows what to create and shape a larger sense of reality.

And speaking of God, let me toss one more poem into the mix, which attempts to address what is perhaps the greatest uncertainty – or, for some, the greatest certainty – of all. It’s called “Do You Believe in God?”

Do you believe in God
you ask, as though
yes or no
is an answer.
Kneel, please,
breathe, inhale
the deep what and please
let there be
let there be
help in the times of trouble,
love at the door
of death.
Yes yes yes
I believe
with frail not knowing
and without
giving it a name.

I think another way to put all this is that the greatest certainty in my life is uncertainty, whether i/m at the bank, in bed or in a state of need and prayer. One final thought: The god I reach for has a sense of humor.