By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
‘It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. Sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when there’s so much bad that had happened? But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.’
– Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings
Like many of you, I’ve been looking out on the world with a sense of awe at its growing instability and deterioration. I was slightly comforted by Fareed Zakaria’s message to Jon Stewart last night that “things have been worse,” but not a lot. Real-time mayhem has a potent kick, and as Eric so succinctly pointed out on Friday, we don’t seem to be making much progress, cycling and re-cycling the same old stuff, the basic foibles of humankind. Me, I’m mouth breathing over how much intellect we seem to have lost in the last fifteen years, how much fire in the belly for justice and civil rights we’ve surrendered in the last fifty or so.
I ran across a little news story this week that seemed to me the epitome of our national disconnect with reality. A Tennessee man walking in a Walmart parking lot with his young son was passed by a car going way too fast. Startled, he yelled for the driver to slow down, prompting her to stop, get out of the car and come at him with a loaded gun, threatening to kill him. He told her he was going to call the cops and she told him to go ahead, she had a gun permit.
And here’s another little mirror of our dysfunction: a Minnesota teenager went outside to tie up her barking dog and was shot three times, sniper-style. Witnesses recognized the shooter as her neighbor, one the girl had previously asked to stop riding his lawnmower through her yard. Want the cherry on the cake? Charged with attempted first-degree murder, the guy “had been employed at the Northwestern Minnesota Juvenile Center as a corrections worker until June 9 of this year.”
There are dozens more, but these will do: the kind of stories we’re beginning to hear too often, the kind that would have been met with a cry of alarm from reasonable citizens a decade ago. But, now, just little stories from a vast collection of similar tales. This is the kind of behavior that makes us wonder WTF happened to good sense and sanity, and if we’re ever going to be able to rescue ourselves. Clearly, we have a problem.
The woman in Tennessee, called a “good gal” by her friends and neighbors, seems to think that because she owns a firearm and has a permit to carry it, she can not only bend the laws to fit her mood but can use her ‘little friend’ to settle whatever argument comes her way. Perhaps that’s what the NRA whispered into her ear, but the cops didn’t agree; she was detained and her gun confiscated. The guy in Minnesota can only be described as several bricks short of a load, and dangerously so, but until a month ago, he was in charge of children in the most challenging of sociological circumstances. Didn’t this pose something of an ethical question for his neighbors, who were aware that he regularly trespassed on other people’s property while armed (and belligerent)? Does that sound like someone you’d let loose on your own child, let alone a group of troubled kids?
If this hiatus in serious thinking and responsible behavior is typical of the nation — and it seems to be — it would seem, at first glance, that the inmates are running the asylum. At second glance, as well, although some places are worse than others. For all its quickly ‘bluing’ demographic, Texas remains the end-all be-all for serious wing-nuttery, reports of which can literally take one’s breath away. Perhaps all this is just temporary, part and parcel of our extraordinary birthing of a new era. Perhaps it’s just Pluto tickling the fancy of a state with both Sun and Moon in Capricorn, transforming it by pushing its exoskeleton past its ability to encompass so much bullshit, although the old joke from my childhood about the Texan too big to bury — who got an enema and was interred in a shoe box — speaks to a long-standing, deeply ingrained tradition of blowhardism.
With a nod to those Texans of whom I’m fond, this state routinely provides us egregious examples of right wing antics, like the ‘open-carry’ rally at Dealey Plaza (yes, on that very grassy knoll) in Dallas, or the Newsweek article about the ranchers who have made immigrant hunting a sport, or the complete dearth of rational thought displayed at a recent anti-immigration rally filmed by Free Press Houston, in which we learn that our president has killed four (count ’em!) of his previous gay lovers. Clearly, if you can’t read U.S. news on a daily basis, keeping an eye on Texas will give you a heads-up on the most pressing matters polluted with the dark fumes of paranoia and irrationality.
The gent who posted that last piece, Tom Boggioni from Pacific Beach, California, describes himself thus: “Mostly he spends his days at the beach gazing at the horizon waiting for the end of the world, or the sun to go down. Whichever comes first.” Frankly, I can understand his hesitancy to get all worked up over either. And, although my heart is dogged in turning up the soft underbelly of our inhumanity to one another so we can see it, carving away at the limiting dross that hides our Light beneath a bushel, I am not immune to the weariness Boggioni describes. I bet you aren’t, either.
It would be one thing if we were aware that the public had gone barking mad while confident that the reality-based among us had a handle on it and that remediation is at hand, but we aren’t. It’s clear that any actual bulwark against The Crazy™ has been missing for quite some time. The elimination of actual fact as ombudsman for reality began to power up when Bill and Hil took the White House, just about the same time the Moral Majority succeeded in politicizing their simplistic, dumbed-down definition of morality. Rewriting reality became an art form in the Bush administration, in tandem with rewritten history among the home-schooled. Now fact and science are opinion, and all things are politically biased. Or, as Herbert Agar put it, “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”
There are a growing number of truth-tellers out there, pecking away at our hardened arteries of nationalism and black/white patriot dreams, and they’re beginning to get a share of readers who are looking to step into the thin neutral zone between the hard-line of obstruction and the seeming wimpiness of the obstructed. Jim Wallis of (Christian left) Sojourners magazine, in his Huffington Post article “Let’s Tell the Truth About This International Madness,” writes, “The horrible human costs and increasing danger the world is now facing in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iraq show the consequences of not telling the truth.”
Wallis continues:
“Instead of dealing with the complicated and conflicted causes of a crisis — instead of honestly assessing U.S. influences, liabilities, and responsibilities in trying to help resolve these conflicts — politicians quickly descend into the blame game. And any self-reflection about how their bombings and occupations have led to more crises, how their unbalanced support for the participants in the conflicts have prevented solutions, or how their self-righteous rhetoric fuels conflicts instead of resolving them — is completely absent.”
Kudos to Wallis for pointing out how this nation hides behind its mythology, historical inaccuracies and posturing. And while I’m at it, kudos to the Pope for calling out the criminals and the heartless and the greedy. Because of the American religious factor, it’s vital for the mainstream church to put forth a message of renewed morality — and by that I mean the whispering of our higher angels, not the dark mumbling of our puritanical devils — especially now that the religious right has gone all wackadoodle, making the left look saner by the minute. But still, it’s not like we don’t already know all this. We do. We ALL know things are not well with the nation, with the planet, and while some of us busy ourselves beating someone else up for the problems we face, others of us are near to desperate for solutions. Can anyone tell me why we can’t seem to rouse ourselves to do anything about it?
No, things aren’t as bad as they are in Palestine, where those caught in that hellish fishbowl have finally begun to protest. Sure, the majority of us still have enough to eat, even though a full FIFTH of us are food insecure, with those numbers growing by the day. We may fancy that we still have too much to lose to rock the boat, but rouse ourselves we must, because if we allow ourselves to be carried by the tide, tossed between the polls that separate the needy from the greedy, never taking a stand, never living from our ethical center, our eventual battering will not just wound us ourselves, but all those whom we care about. We will have failed the true test of spiritual resolve that asks us to do no harm, by failing to prevent it when we met it.
Like Frodo, we all carry the ring. It may not be THE ring (I think Dick Cheney had it not long ago, lent him by one of the Koch brothers), but each of us is surely asked to wrestle with our internal dynamic of self interest vs. selflessness in order to overcome the world we have created around us. And while it is not enough to do the inner work without finding an activist’s role in the outer, we often attempt to look out on a faltering world without owning our part of its woes. As Eckhart Tolle tells us, “The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”
There was one last little news story that got my attention this week. It seems to me an apt explanation for where we are and what we’re doing — at least for the moment. A green-leaning couple in Glendora, California went to the mailbox and pulled out a letter from the city threatening them with a $500 fine for allowing their lawn to brown. Neighbors had evidently turned them in. It arrived on the same day that the state approved mandatory watering restrictions, threatening $500 fines for those who ignore the new plan to limit water use. And now this responsible pair, who had pro-actively adjusted their water use, will be required to pony up a wad of cash to satisfy a system that has yet to adjust to the realities of this century. That’s where we find ourselves today, with a foot in both world views. We have not gotten where we’re going, completed our experience of the 2012 energies, the cross-point that has brought us to a painful awareness of the growing injustices we’ve ignored too long; we’ve not taken note of what is unsustainable and toxic.
We have yet to get a clear picture of what’s imperative: in this instance, choice between a green lawn or the water table. In the case of Detroit, even the basic right to water is in question. Laws have become muddled, turned inside out. For instance, we can’t deny working women a decent wage, make no attempt to provide child care and still put them in jail for their children going unattended in cars and parks. We can’t continue to suck off the bones of public money to fill the purse of private commerce. What is unsustainable for those of us without means has yet to pop up on the well-to-do’s radar. It’s up to us to make sure it does, convincing them that it is in the public — and therefore, private — interest to restore a healhy middle class and lift others out of poverty. Real compassion cannot leave these problems unaddressed.
From the long view, the ongoing Uranus/Pluto aspect that continues to push transformation forward looked different in the mid-60s. There’s revolution for change, and then there’s whatever this is: a kind of revolving door of paranoid fantasy involving taxation and sexuality and ownership issues from centuries past. The left may have been whipped into a frenzy back in the day, the protests polarizing and sometimes out of control, those on the hard-left stumbling into occasional criminal activities, but I don’t remember any lack of factual evidence on which we based our concerns. The war was bogus; history has spoken. The CIA was complicit; the records remain. The schism in culture was no more difficult then than now, but there was no evangelical movement to twist and turn the situation for political outcome.
Put plainly, I don’t remember that we made shit up or were deluded by fears. In fact, we were pretty fearless. As we consider the full expression of the Grand Cross activities, we’re experiencing another aspect of that revolutionary energy, not as innocent as it was back in the day. It’s a much darker expression and it calls for a response — even leadership — from those of us who recognize how important is this moment and how hesitant we seem to be to engage in shaping it. Looking over the landscape of these last years, I find myself echoing Fishin’ Jim’s favorite line: “They can’t take our freedom from us, but we can surely give it away.” And that’s exactly what we’ve done, again and again, with not much more than a murmur.
Perhaps we’ll find our voice now that Jupiter has taken up residence in Leo. These are courageous energies, not the kind that go quietly into the night. I hope they speak to you, find purchase in your intellect, find residence in your heart. You — we all — deserve better than we’re providing ourselves, but it will take a village of us to put those concerns on the table.
If you find yourself suddenly moved to stand up and be counted, there are grassroots groups that would welcome you, so many activities begging for your help that you can’t help but feel bolstered and appreciated by people of like mind. Visit PopularResistance.org to see what’s going on in your world. Check with local artisans and agro-groups, progressive churches and not-for-profits to see what you can do to help out. I will guarantee you that whatever you do that helps another — that supports the whole, that encourages harmlessness — will enlarge your experience and bless your circumstances.
This is hardly the worst time in history, but it is surely a moment of decision in terms of what the future will provide us, a turning point that each of us must take responsibility for. If we’re attempting communion with our spiritual self, willing to walk the talk and do the work, then we must understand that everything we see around us has suddenly become “our business.” Unconditional love leaves the well-being of no one out, does it?
Our ability to follow in that hero’s journey is a decision each of us must make anew each day, spurred on by all we see around us. Some of us, I suspect, will prefer to sit this one out, but to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man of great heart and ethical integrity, “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please — you can never have both.”
No kidding! So we replaced all the carbon based cells with crystalline and now we will rejuvenate these for the next 7 years. Good. Mine are exhausted already. Thanks Jude!
We ARE acting now, through technology. As an example, witness the election of Barack Obama. He won the younger vote overwelmingly. Young people, as you already know are connoisseurs of social media. You provide that spark, and we will light it up like gangbusters. It is a lot harder to get away with a lie on the campaign trail when all you can do is google it. During the 2012 election cycle, there was a couple of unelightened hopefuls that made comments about rape. They made the mistake of putting it on the air. Someone will post said comments on Facebook or Twitter. BOOM! Down goes their career. Now, if they decide to run again, all a millennial can do is pick up a phone, look, and see that same comment at the top of the page. Not only us young people, anyone can do it. I can only imagine the pace of technology around 2020, or 2040. It will impossible for authorities to contain THAT much power once it is unleashed. I will repeat, they will pass on. (Aah, the block, once on roll like this it’s bound to stop.). Ok, back on track. We of the Pluto in Scorpio cohort will mop up the mess and get this planet spick-n-span. Though I am curious about the Pluto in Libra crowd. The late 70’s kids. If this was an army invasion, you would be at the front line already. The cavalry. The millennials would be the infantry and the Pluto in Sagittarians will be the backup. You are leading the way RIGHT NOW, use this wonderful gift called technology. Remember, they are fewer in number and will only shrink further. As a matter of fact, the north node is in Libra RIGHT NOW! This is humanities aim, fight for peace, balance, harmony, love, justice. We are at the ready to make earth PROUD.
“In less than 7 years we could see a total transformation in our present methods of governing as well as a total change in attitudes among citizens regarding all the things that drive us crazy.”
That bears repeating, my dear, so I did! Seven is the PERFECT number for such structural change, be, the same length of time it takes to completely replenish the cellular structure of the human body, and the exact number of years it takes to integrate a ‘teaching’ into that structure [roughly, a quarter of a Saturn cycle.] I remember writing a piece on the 7-cycle back when Bush was running for his second term, concerned that if we had four more years of him it would take us into integration phase of faux-reality and we’d be stuck in tribalism, American exceptionalism and corporate dominance for years … mmm … and, as it turns out …
Hey there, Musicman! About the comedy/drama switcheroo mit der tears, I read a little snip from Neale Donald Walsch yesterday that gave me another perspective:
Mourning is a wonderful thing. At least, for me it is, and I hope that it is for you. I experience that mourning brings out my humanity and places me deeply in touch with it. It connects me, thus, to my divinity, because when I am deeply, deeply in touch with my humanity, and with all that it means to be fully human, I find that I feel deeply in touch with my divinity as well.
To be fully human feels to me to be the same as being truly divine. I experience that there is a place of holiness where our divinity and humanity meet, and that in this place of wholeness our True Nature is revealed.
Crying is the other side of laughter, and makes it possible. Tears are the connector between the two. We have tears in our eyes when we cry and when we laugh, because our tears do not know the difference. They only know Divinity, you see. They are the fullness of emotion, spilling out as Life Itself, expressed profoundly. And that is divinity.
So, crying and laughing, sometimes at the same time — just God godding, yes? But I understand your feeling somewhat frail about all we’re being bombarded with. I’m extra touchy about some things these days, particularly animals. I can put almost everything else into higher perspective but when it comes to animal abuse, I come a bit unglued. And when it’s at the hands of BULLIES like these cops — all around the country — I go ballistic!
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/shoot-mich-woman-lawsuit-claims-cops-coldly-executed-dog-article-1.1876082
https://www.facebook.com/DogsShotbyPolice
http://rt.com/usa/175372-officer-dog-shot-lawsuit/
As a fellow Sag, I think you know how quickly that energy bubbles to the surface, and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s possible for the average Sag to repress too much emotion, which keeps us “above water,” so to speak. This morning, my son and I were watching political junk on TV (which is harder and harder to tolerate, I find) when some dolt tripped that button and I went off on an epic rant about police brutality and the epidemic of “puppycide” while intimidating heartbroken pet-parents, followed by well-earned lawsuits (and I think I mentioned small penises and equally small brainpans, yadda.) My kid said dogs were the ‘new black.’ Until the next sub-set, anyhow. When this stuff hits my Leo heart, the only thing that soothes me is to pace the house until the sorrow passes.
I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment, Greg — and I’m delighted that you had so many answers to my [rhetorical] question, since there’s NO question that the grassroots is growing in influence and (Hi, Holly!) the demographic is shifting. I’m of a mind that whatever we do to support others, spread kindness and shine Light lifts the vibration of the planet and provides counterbalance to the darkness that seems so dense right at the moment. So biking and recycling and growing food and doing all those things that break the spell of the consumption-culture is HUGELY beneficial to a return to sanity. Nothing is too small to make a necessary ripple in the pond, when it’s heartfelt … and THAT is as much the point of my piece today as grabbing a pitchfork and marching on Washington.
I also agree that we don’t have to do it the way it WAS done — none of us need to become more martyred to this cause than we already find ourselves. This isn’t the 60s, huge numbers of folks in the street don’t mean the same thing it used to (now that decades of laws have been watered down to lessen the credibility of the average citizen’s voice and political impact.)
And there is no doubt that there is threat to authority from this kind of display. I read lately that they’re beginning to use the LRAD “Sonic” weapon more regularly now. They don’t call it a weapon, it’s for “crowd control.” Of course the point of most marches is non-violent protest which usually only turns violent when provoked by overzealous authority … but that’s something we can pretty much count on, now that our local cop shops have all these new military toys and instructions for how to use them.
And obviously, we don’t have to take our outrage to the streets since it seems to show up in our neighborhood to shoot our dog — or taze the relative we called for help with — or put somebody in a choke hold for asking a question. And while that sounds grim and cynical, I don’t see how Pluto can run the Capricorn gauntlet without transformation of the use and abuse of authority. It’s ours to do.
And yes, Holly, on all you wrote — I have great hopes for the Millennials and I know how much the generational push/pull can change things. The demographic that watches FOX News is well passed retirement — the tag end of the Pluto in Cancer crowd, circling the wagons with their last bit of energy — their biases antiquated in comparison to the world our young people inhabit, but … and here’s my concern … each time we DON’T speak up over some outrage, it’s the same as APPROVING it, allowing the energy to push the envelope even farther. The last fifteen years of political meltdown is witness.
I have no doubt your generation will see, at minimum, much of the culture wars won, Holly, and hopefully have very different national concerns … but NOW is our point of power, NOW is when the remaining Pluto in Leo generation can remember their former altruism and dedication to egalitariansim and NOW is when each of us is called to offer our contribution to these changing times.
I agree with what Carlos has to say about all (that we see around us) being a dream — our collective dream. It’s esoteric, but narrow your eyes just a bit and peek into the shadows, you can SEE how it works. Each time Sarah pulls cards with Swords poking this way and that, I am reminded that Air = Mentality and swords waving in the air, surrounding us, equals mental cruelty. That’s what we’re living, because that’s what we’re allowing.
Our thoughts have turned chaotic on the other side of realizing that what we thought worked didn’t, what we thought was true wasn’t and we’re still working our way through the energy curve that both explodes and transforms what is old and no longer workable. It’s messy and mean and likely to get worse before it gets better, but it requires ALL of us to give it our attention and devotion — our laughter and our tears — NOW.
So, grim reading and grim reality to go with it, but as a process, this is the darkness before the dawn. Like Samwise told Frodo, even darkness must pass, but it won’t even begin to dissipate if we don’t stand up to it and that’s the point, today. We beat back darkness by BEING Light, by being love and compassion and not allowing our weakest — or ourselves — to be victimized without standing witness and speaking truth.
Even the smallest of us are called upon to take responsibility for that little bit we CAN do, even if it frightens us. As Mandela told us, courage isn’t the absence of fear but our triumph over it. I’d think that’s both how we grow our soul, and how we birth a new Era.
Thanks, everyone, for a good conversation. Make a terrific week for yourselves, shine a little Light and be blessed, each one!
Hi Judith thank you -profusely- for your response. “state militia” so a state’s rights thing. as a state Illinois has this weird insulated thing it does where it pretends it is mirror for, pretty much, the world, at this point. but it’s not legitimate. city planners always talking about getting “recognized” on the world stage because aren’t we anyway? this i perceive with my third eye, in all probability. i think the truth is we have some pretty darn good architecture, and get in a nit about imperfection and any and all remaining etheric misalignment caused by either “reputation” or actual not-so-good behavior. a lot of Catholicism contributes to the imagined outreach as well.
we’re known for being a blue state but we are also very red and i live on the outskirts of the suburbs — besides the insulation of Midwest Illinois in general there’s a disenfranchisement going on “out here” because of the liberal/conservative disconnect in this state which affects a lot of things that can be categorized as “politics” i mean the politics are very robust here. that, at least!, is not make-believe.
did anybody else sense that Jupiter went from being magically descriptive to, well, missionary-esque. I’m bummed. i was bummed that Jupiter didn’t want to retrograde over my Saturn in late Cancer…. Jupiter also doesn’t transit Aries for long. feeling deprived of retrogrades of my natal Jupiter-Saturn square!
anyway, i’m going for yogurt and a movie so i’ve got to cut it short right now. i do want to say i’m sorry you’ve got a Grand Dragon down the lane. and woah do i not even want to know what that means.
Well, by golly, now we’re on to something, and I want to reply to each of you but it will be in fits and starts, as Fishin’ Jim is just home from the hospital [heart procedure] and I’m splitting time between home and his place [just down the lane.] As well, forgive my absence yesterday, on one of the hottest days in July [of course] the well went dead, creating havoc, and since I’m the well captain for this little section of the Pea Patch, had to mobilize. Turned out to be a broken pipe but running it down and digging it up took time and talent [not mine, neighbors with heavy machinery!] So I got to read comments with no time to reply.
First, I live deep in gun country too, rabbity, and there’s no real ‘winning’ this argument although the DELUSION is that any attempt to regulate limits individual rights (when in actuality you can’t shout FIRE in a crowded theatre without culpability which should make obvious that some wingnut with a history of mental health problems should not have the right to an arsenal that allows him to kill everyone in it either.) The problem with the Second Amendment issue is that radical conservatives have kidnapped the original meaning — pertaining to self-defense organized through state militia — and turned it into a Gawd-given right to possess and use a fire arm without restriction or oversight.
That’s sustained by a whole network of paranoia that insists that the government is coming after the guns, disarming the public so they will be sitting ducks when they’re rounded up and marched into camps — and while we do have precedent for that kind of thing (listen to George Takei’s moving experience of being taken from his family home at gunpoint), US government also has precedent in NOT policing weaponry, except in the most extreme cases and for public safety.
Historically, that’s a fear-form that ties back to the Reconstruction period after the Civil War — when Lincoln’s successor badly punished the South, still smoldering both economically and culturally from losing what they considered a Holy war — and, as it’s codified in the Bill of Rights, even prior to that. A right to self-defense is surely critical to liberty; but not without taking responsibility for its aftermath.
It’s a perversion of the meaning of the amendment, which retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens tells us could be — and should be — corrected with the addition of a simple sentence. The need to clarify specifics showed up in two judges threatening some 20 million Affordable Care Act recipients because of a typo this week, which proves that legislatively, we can’t expect good sense to prevail when a portion of the population is out to kill government and the laws that support it.
As for waving to the gun shop guy, I’d hope so. Part of the process, I think, is learning how to disagree without being disagreeable. We’re all part of the human family and reminding those who would pigeon hole us lefties [commie pinko whatever] that we’re not the horrific creatures sold to them in their propaganda tracts and on their radio stations is good social policy (and perhaps deterrent to aggression.) I’d encourage you to continue waving at the neighbors, even though you have my sympathies. I felt much like you when I found out the Grand Dragon of the local KKK lived just down the lane. And when I discovered that the nice family in the big house on the hill was the same one responsible for poisoning the ground water with their manufacturing business a couple of decades ago, and quite probably responsible for the rash of birth defects that followed.
As I see it, the ease with which we’re projecting the use of weaponry these days is the slippery slope to ONLY using weapons to solve our problems — we’re already seeing it in our overly militarized police forces, which seem no longer taught how to negotiate, protect OR serve in anything but a kill or be killed scenario! Like suicide, guns offer a permanent solution to a temporary situation … and they must be used judiciously and with great care. [I have more to say about THAT too — OMG, my Leo stellium is vibrating like a tuning fork!] More later …
Holly, I like your perspective. . . AND your attitude! Stick around, okay?
Seriously Greg, you make some excellent points. Hope you stick around too!
The majority of the Pluto in Cancer generation has left the planet and those who remain are sidelined. For the next year, the Pluto in Leo generation will be getting motivated by this Jupiter transit of that sign. Expect miracles.
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Another thing that is ripe for change is the overreaction from some adults to children. Story after story I’ve been lately about kids being punished for minor things. Bring a little green army toys atop cupcakes to school, be prepared to have them removed for being “insensitive”. REALLY! A kindergartener no less. Google kid suspended for and prepare for a marathon of derp. I know I am ranting, I have been blessed by attending school runned by professional people. Common sense is all that I am asking for. I feel so sorry for the Pluto in Sagittarius kids that are taking the brunt of this. However, I feel confident in saying that they will turn things for the better. They, i think, know whats going on. Social media helps too. For they are the fire that is being reignited after the “flood”, the Pluto in Scorpio finishes our end of the bargain. I assure you that once we reach the age where they are now, the Tea Party would exist no more. There is so much love and light radiating from these kids. If the voting age was lowered to 10, I bet the left will regain the house in about 10 seconds. Just a thought. Ooh, gets me under the collar right here. “Calm down, Holly, calm down”. All we have to do is wait.
Jude, in reading your piece earlier I was vacillating between hysterical laughter and tears. I prefer the laughter, although the tears are cathartic, (I think I may be crazy). I laughed my ass off the other day reading in the local paper regarding the homeowners association fining the cats’ for their brown lawn, after reading that California can fine you for a green lawn. Saw it comin’ a mile away ($500 is enough to make me a fugitive).
I’ve deleted several ‘pre’-posts today.. too vitriolic even for me. Tryin’ to tone it more friendly.
Holly, Greg, you both nailed portions of my rants. Holly, speaking of the contemporary power cats, “..Soon enough, they will die..”, you were much kinder than I, and well realized. Greg, Total-fucking-ly.. I’m a bike riding, garden planting, feeding and socializing cat who realizes that the best use of my energy is ‘being’ the actuality that I desire to see.
My take is that the ’60’s were a more naive extroverted expression of the energies. These days, there are a hell of a lot of calculating introverts (some, pretty damned evil.. some will show Love that’s never been imagined).
I can’t ‘stress out’ on this reality too much, it makes me ill. I’m a fraction of a drop in the bucket of time-space reality… I’m pretty sure I’ve been here, there, and everywhere.. forever.
Thank you guys for being you..
With Love,
Jere
I have a crazy theory about why all this crazy stuff is happening lately. One part has to do that reason they are so obtuse about everything progressive is they are afraid of the future. See, the Tea Party is catering to an old, white, conservative people who are scared of the young, the different, the non-conformist, whatever does not fit into the 50’s mold of Stepford-like sameness.
The second has to with the term “Pluto generations”. The majority of my group, the millennials, have Pluto in Scorpio. Pluto RULES Scorpio. Scorpio is a water sign. We are the “flood” that will wipe away the obsolete, the policies that no longer jive with the 21st century. They KNOW who we will vote for, they KNOW why. Demographics are not in their favor unless they snap out of it. Soon enough, they will die. We will take the reins and correct this ship in due course. The next group, the Pluto in Sagittaruians, will make it even better. What with their optimism and all. They are just making this all the easier to be honest. I will vote in the mid-terms, I will see off 2016. Little by little, we will erode the unworkable. An idea in my mind, but it makes a lot of sense in the long run.
“Can anyone tell me why we can’t seem to rouse ourselves to do anything about it?”
A few things: adrenaline depletion, organ damage from being outraged all the time, burn out from being on red alert for so long, and the sheer size of the problem. Then there’s all the entertainment. No one can get a message to the mass media without it being twisted to serve the money lords.
But then at the same time which of which ‘we’ do you speak? There’s lots of us riding bikes, growing food, building community too, but we don’t get much press. The resistance we’re up against is so titanic that it could wipe us all off the face of the Earth with a couple of well aimed bombs if we were to organize and march all in one place with enough of us to force the media to notice. As soon as we’re big enough to notice they start shooting and twisting the message. Maybe the real revolution is happening all over the place, in the nooks and crannies and you can’t find it except by becoming part of it cause it doesn’t get airplay.
I’m sick of massing up in the streets and being outraged. Is that the best we can do? The quieter work of riding our bikes in the face of car culture, planting food within walking distance, building community doesn’t shine like a march in the streets, but it lays cultural foundations that have time to grow before the bullets start flying. If we insist on making it a war then the warriors will fry us with ease and no regrets.
Well, there you go. The crazies REALLY ARE running the country, even the nooks and crannies. Only in a movie would we be permitted to weep with laughter at situations like this, or maybe on TV’s Modern Family, because they would be exaggerations of the truth. Except they aren’t anymore. Until things got this bad – as bad as the examples you provide us Jude – we didn’t know how really “sick” the country was. Sickness could be disguised, hidden, overlooked, dismissed as no big deal. Until Pluto started digging and Uranus came out of the Pisces water, it was easy to dismiss the symptoms of crazy here and there. Not any more. The sands of time have run out and there’s not enough left to bury our heads in.
As the transiting Moon (The People) prepares to conjoin transiting Jupiter (Understanding), I thought I would have a look at a chart for when the Sun (Consciousness) made a conjunction to Jupiter the other day. Reason being, it could (1) suggest what possibilities and challenges we have in store for the next year (before Sun conjuncts Jupiter again) and (2) their conjunction this past Thursday is opposite (Aquarius) where the present cycle between Saturn and Jupiter will end. In other words, it might reflect how much further we can climb in our consciousness (Sun) expansion (Jupiter) as set out by the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction chart of 2000. That chart held a powerful square between Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and Uranus, which could very well allow for a lot of crazy for the following 20 years.
Would you believe. . . . . . the U.S. Sibly Neptune (22+ Virgo) is exactly conjunct the MC of that Jupiter-Sun cycle conjunction chart; a picture of what this planetary cycle will provide for the next year? Yeah, and transiting Neptune is in the 3rd house of communications!
Well, to be fair (less irrational), Neptune symbolizes compassion as well as crazy. It could go either way, or half and half. Who knows? The good news is that it is a See-Saw pattern. . . up and down. . . with Sun-Jupiter-Mercury-Moon-Venus on one side and all the others on the opposite seat of the see-saw. Even Saturn and Uranus are “on the same side” in their thrashing out quincunx aspect; the one that decides on just how the sign they co-rule (Aquarius) will “evolve”.
(pause for deep breaths. . . . . okay back to the subject)
About Texas, (priceless story Jude; the shoebox one choked me on my toast from laughter) you’re dang right. Texas IS the barometer (watching Mercury rise and fall) in this asylum we call home. What can you do but laugh? Well, plenty. Not that Kentucky can’t be just as bad, but Alison Lundergan Grimes (or Alice in Wonderland as I prefer) is doing some fine (even funny) advertising about her opponent Mitch McConnell for his (present) seat in the U.S. Senate, and boy he’s coming out defensive as hell-o. So help me, I think she can do it! But what can I do; hmm. . . . . . .
Yeah, like Wallis says, “descending into the blame game” is still the basic tool for political campaigns; the Saturn (same old routine) part of the Aquarius fracture. But the humor. . that’s the unexpected Uranus twist; the new creep we’re seeing in advertising political differences that makes watching commercials (of any kind) bearable. (I believe we can thank transiting Neptune in the U.S. Sibly 3rd house of advertising/communicating for his subtle, almost unnoticeable influence.) Still, what difference can advertising make in who will get to go to Washington. Hmm. . . .
You remember how the word was that Disclosure would shock us into realizing how greatly we had been lied to; that knowing “the Truth” about what our governments and the Powerful had denied from the Common Folk would bring us to our feet in protest and desire for change? I had it in my “mind” that the non-earthlings would be bringing those truths to us in some fashion. And bless my soul, I believe they have, but in the guise of the likes of Jim Wallis, and writers like yourself Miss Jude. Everywhere we are seeing more and more, bit by bit, the truth revealed to us. We don’t want to hear it, but we can’t escape it. Geez, do I have to hear all the gory details of how murderers are executed in a slow painful way because prisons can’t get the “proper” (quick and painless) drugs anymore from other countries (or local labs either) because they won’t participate in our country’s murdering of bad people? Bad for business or just plain inhumane? Whatever, wake up America and get with the program.
Thanks for the PopularResistance web site Jude, and your other suggestions as to how to participate in the village of change, necessary change that must take place for the New World to succeed. It is an Aquarian thing, this looking to the future, and both transiting rulers of Aquarius, Saturn and Uranus, have revealed how to do it (their cycle began in 1988) in their latest incarnation chart; born conjunct the Galactic Center, they get their marching orders from the Universe.
That includes (in their birth chart) a little centaur named Pholus in Gemini in a T-square with the nodes (Pisces and Virgo), with the goddess Ceres at the north node and Venus at the south node. Venus at the south end in Virgo (give love generously and in practical ways) opposite – but within the same energy spectrum – Ceres at the north end in Pisces (seek to nurture and provide compassion) and what starts out small will become, through communication, a world-wide effort (Pholus in Gemini).
In that chart, Pholus trines Mercury in Libra as well as Vesta, and he sextiles Eris (whip up the crowd) who, between them, form a yod with Pluto at the release point; this in order to incite the inactive into action. Transiting Uranus will reach an opposition to that Pluto point release in May, 2021, less than 5 months after the present Jupiter-Saturn (societal and cultural) cycle ends. In less than 7 years we could see a total transformation in our present methods of governing as well as a total change in attitudes among citizens regarding all the things that drive us crazy. I calls ’em as I see ’em.
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Grim tone: Thanks, Judith, for all this bad news… I did not know Texas had a Sun and Moon in Capricorn, although maybe I should have.
I find myself in a kind of fearful place when it comes to guns. It’s not the mass shooters — I probably understand what’s happening there better than most. It’s what you describe- the thought that having a gun permit means that you can wield your gun safely and everybody is going to be okay with that. Part of my meltdown in June was about a piece of information i finally let into my psyche — the owner of one of the largest gun stores in the country actually lives behind me, in a mansion, on a pond i used to hang out around as a child. ohhh! well! now, i did a little investigating and this place has a lot of customers who are police that use the shooting range… they have a little blog at their site about the new concealed carry laws and they seem to be interested in gunowners being trained properly. And I actually do see the point of having concealed carry men who might otherwise have trouble finding a place in the world here to protect us all from the random unbalanced and getting moreso random psycho person. But from all evidence, which you present, that’s like pie in the sky idealized crap. Do gunowners feel they should be trained, like police? right? we need a few good guys (and tough gals) who aren’t crazy. Lady in walmart parking lot with permit: ummm?
anyway, i was starting to get worried there, for a second, that i might be the first liberal commie bastard to get shot when the revolution happens. yiiiiikes. and then i got to thinking about the business of gunshops and it’s like, why should the government support that. so, i haven’t thought it all through but i don’t get this 2nd amendment thing. Words just don’t hurt as much as guns. I’d like to get involved with some things but i bet most of my neighbors do have guns. I’ve started waving and smiling, even to gunshop guy, when i get a chance. I’m ok/ you’re ok and maybe they’ll put them down someday. Mount them on the wall real good or something.
Oh the stress! There’s a neighborhood social media site to register for, but then it’s like what will you find? Too Christian? Too Conservative? Too sleepy? Well, they wave and smile and say hi back so that’s good. ~and, no, a few years ago, they weren’t doing that too much but you do gotta worry about a party without it’s ethics OR morals in place that insists on winning elections… is that harsh? well, yeah, maybe it’s not good news at all, this gun thing.
thanks Judith for being a harpy about it because this is way too hard. (Jesus! For real? Right behind me?)