I spent a good chunk of yesterday reading over comment threads on Facebook and this blog about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Friday’s Capricorn solstice. I was trying to find my bearings, find what could possibly be left to say about being alive on this planet to witness the last day of an ancient calendar cycle; what there is left to say about witnessing the mass killing of young children and the discussions springing up about the event.
My Sagittarius Moon is within a couple degrees of the Galactic Center, which the Sun conjoins today. I kept hoping my antennae might buzz, or that in taking a walk down the street, I might be struck by some profound insight, beamed in straight from the GC. Instead, I found myself mired in various tasks that made it hard to find a through-line to inner depths or even inspiration. And then I realized that some of the comments I had read possessed such a clear message and resonated so strongly with me, that maybe recognizing that message meant my Moon was working after all.
“Eris is forcing us to become aware of one of our flaws: not dealing with the problem of assault weapons availability,” wrote commenter bkoehler. “Pholus has taken one small private pain (1 person, 1 small town) and made it a nation-wide suffering.”
This was a theme I noticed in a few places, and not just about the gun issue: that more people seem to be open to hearing and explicitly talking about the confluence of issues that have intertwined to allow 20 children and six adults to be killed by one young and apparently deeply troubled man.
We are seeing the unconscionable gaps in our mental health services; our industrial-strength warehousing of people (especially young men of color, and those with mental illness) in prisons; our increasing appetite for violence in the media, in entertainment, in speech and thought; our state of perpetual war and consumerist distraction. More people seem to be saying, ‘this issue is showing us an entire web of our cultural failures, and we are willing to consider their relationships to each other — and to ourselves’.