CommonWonders
Co-creating a culture of peace
Robert Koehler: Peace journalist
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other ...
We are at a terrifying transition of consciousness, and this transition faces enormous resistance, primarily at the institutional level. If we believe in a society that is more humane, more empathy-driven, than the one we have now, we are on our own and easily marginalized by the powers that be.
This is our challenge: to find one another and start building a humane, sustainable future!
I call myself a writer. I’m also a career journalist: reporter, editor, columnist. I started out working for the late, great Lerner Newspapers, a chain of weekly papers that covered the North Side of Chicago and part of the north and northwest suburbs. I loved that job and stayed at Lerner for a dozen years. I hadn’t expected to, but the job wound up connecting me in vital ways to a pulsating, complex community through which pretty much the whole world was passing; it pulled me out of a naïve self-importance and into my destiny, which has been: to listen to people, to hear their humanity, to find the right words to convey it.
I’ve written a weekly column for a third of my life. For ten years I turned one out at Lerner. Since 1999, I’ve written a column that has been nationally syndicated by Tribune Media Services, which is part of the Chicago Tribune. That column was initially called by the name this website still bears, Common Wonders. It started out more personal than political, then, post-9/11, as the Bush administration unleashed its war on terror, I became increasingly focused on current events. I referred to the column as “part political brawl, part secular prayer.”
I’ve won awards for my writing: from the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, the Chicago Headline Club and other organizations that bestow blessings on journalists. I’ve been called a hero of democracy and, oh yeah, been wished an inoperable brain tumor. I’ve trespassed, as a journo aiming at a mainstream audience, upon the sacred consensus that America is a dumbed down, spectator nation, yet somehow special, God’s Chosen Superpower, the greatest nation on Earth. Let’s get beyond our limited allegiances, I say, and celebrate our wholeness as a species and a planet.
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
