WELCOME TO PLANET WAVES. Today we are posing the lead article from our subscriber edition. The full edition includes the weekly horoscope, writing by Judith Gayle and an excerpt from A Course in Miracles. Subscribe at this link.
Dear Friend and Reader:
ONE THING I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few days is what it would be like for Martin Luther King to have seen Barack Obama’s speech Thursday night. Dr. King of all people would understand that this was not the symbol of progress, but the thing itself. Whether Barack wins or loses, what matters is that he is a contender for president of the United States.
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Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, July 1939: “Colored” water fountains were fixtures throughout the South during the Jim Crow era. Photo by Russell Lee.
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I was born in 1964, and within my lifetime, “separate but equal” facilities still existed. It may seem outrageous to any young person today, but until 1965, in our country, African Americans had to use different bathrooms than Caucasians. It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Loving v. Virginia that blacks and whites could legally marry one another.
For those unfamiliar with history, this was fully 100 years after the abolition of slavery: you know, white folks at the front of the bus and colored folks at the back.
Now we have an African-American presidential candidate, and not only that, a good one. He speaks in full sentences and he can spell his own name and he went to Columbia University in New York City. He has ideas and an aura of authentic dignity. He has spent time living out of the country doing something besides shooting people. He is promising to lead the country on some course other than open war and corporate greed at every possible opportunity.
I have vivid images in my mind of his mom schlepping him around Honolulu as a kid, struggling to pay the bills. He was raised by a single mother, not in a model 2.4 kid, mother, father and Fido household of Americana mythology. He is from an actual normal American family. He has, no doubt, personally gone grocery shopping. He grew up black in the United States, which is an extremely difficult thing to do; that distinction alone has about a one in three chance of landing you in jail in our era. When you have that experience, you know what it means to struggle with the unspoken rules of our society.
These are not the essential qualities of leadership, but they are, in our time, its prerequisites. I, for one, a man born in the 1960s who writes in full sentences and says what I mean, see myself in Barack Obama. Were I going to be a presidential candidate, I would be more like him than anyone I’ve ever seen run for that office. He reminds me of someone I would have happily worked for when one of my hobbies was writing political campaigns. He is the obvious choice, particularly compared to Old Poopie Pants, who can’t open his mouth without telling a lie. Nothing against elderly folks, but we don’t need Grandpa Munson as president right now. We need someone whose biological clock at least puts him in contact with the notion of the future.
What Obama will accomplish, if he’s elected and if the current administration gives up power on Jan. 20, remains to be seen. It’s not easy getting things done in politics even in the very best times, with full cooperation. We are facing an enormous mess to clean up after eight years of a strictly criminal administration that has done little other than pump out the national treasury, shred the environment, wreak havoc on two impoverished countries and have more American kids sent home in body bags than any time since the Vietnam War.
We have at the very least an administration that allowed 9/11 to happen so it could get those wars to happen, and at the worst, rigged up the whole thing.
The banking and credit industries have morphed into one enormous Enron, and in a way directly reminiscent of Enron’s investing tactics, heating oil is going for $5 a gallon. How many more people are going to freeze to death this winter, because of that? We have lived through nearly a decade of an administration that, as Mr. Obama said last night, sat on its hands as a major American city drowned. Oh, and by some coincidence, mostly colored folks lived there.
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Obama with wife Michelle and children Thursday night after his acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium.
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We have the National Security State spying on members of Congress and many citizens. We have Blackwater Security that has grown too large, and too powerful: literally, a private militia of the Holy Roman Empire. We supposedly have detention centers in every state, and a great many people who believe they have nothing to do with incarcerating “illegal aliens.”
Every day thousands more people are foreclosed out of their homes in our current suburban version of The Grapes of Wrath.
There used to be a time when under circumstances like these, we would vote the gangrenous runts out of office and make sure the other party at least had a chance to straighten things out. However, after two stolen elections — blatantly stolen, not the usual subtle kind of theft — we have a little problem on our hands. Ripped off is one thing, and by whom is another. By now, most of us have heard of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, the military quartermasters who currently control the White House. Most of them are also involved in the oil industry. Most Americans have been too busy working three jobs to be able to care all that much. And often it takes a while for people to realize they’ve been ripped off. Most people never find out; they just feel the pain.
But we’ve been down so very long that it looks like up. The fact is, we are still down: weighed down with debt, with illness we can’t afford medical care for, with the lingering fear about jobs we don’t know we’ll have next week. Despite this, a lot of people are going to vote for McCain specifically because he’s not black. America’s racial shadow always seems to be cast behind us and we don’t often look over our shoulders.
A lot of people are going to vote strictly on the expectation that McCain will appoint a “pro-life” justice when the next Supreme Court seat becomes available. These are the people who would vote for the “pro-life” candidate even if he happened to be Benito Mussolini. There are more of them than you think.
It’s going to be a close race, and elections are usually a lot easer to steal when the public is split, and it has been profoundly split for the past two elections. Just the fact that we have a president currently seated who lost the popular vote in 2000 should be enough to send chills down everyone’s spine. The fact that the nation did not rise up in protest should induce nausea.
The astrology chart for the 2008 election is a mess, directly reminiscent of the 2000 election. The ice caps are still melting, the economy is still melting and a lot of problems could come down like a house of cards on the next administration. Indeed, we have yet to see the current administration leave office. George Bush is not yet an ex-president and more to the point, Dick Cheney is not an ex-vice president. The Tao Te Ching reminds us that the end is written in the beginning, and the Cheney-Bush administration came in on a constitutional crisis. They are likely to make their exit on one.
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Barack Obama entered the stadium to U2’s “City of Blinding Lights”.
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But there is other astrology to consider. Pluto, for the past two years, has been making its way across the Galactic Core. Pluto is the planet of evolution, and the core of our galaxy is like the stellar Mecca that we find in the end degrees of Sagittarius. Many of us speculated about what this could mean, since it has not happened in more than 250 years. The last time around, this heralded something called The Enlightenment, the rise of science, the gradual decline of the totalitarian Catholic Church and the birth of the constitutional form of government that we now cling to. On either side of that event last time around, we went from the Salem Witch Trials to the First Amendment.
Though it is difficult to judge the progress of a society, we seem to have crossed a bridge that nobody saw — a bridge that put us into some contact with the basic awareness that change depends on the human factor more than any other one. The scenery on one side of a bridge is not necessarily so different than the scenery on the other side, but it is a different place. In any spiritual process, there are people who lead the way, there are others who go willingly and some go kicking and screaming. There are others who take up arms and go in the other direction.
Many of us talk about changing society without remembering how difficult it is to simply change the way that we live, think or relate to our loved ones. We want change, but we struggle emotionally to cope with our own pain. We forget the desperate fear that keeps millions of people driving two ton SUVs because they feel entitled to live through a car accident that would kill anyone else. Many people are determined to take all their problems into the crematorium and start over again next time.
And there are millions of people around us who are committed to having at least a shred of awareness. That may seem a long way from any destination, but it evokes what A Course in Miracles calls the small willingness to open the way for all the progress that’s necessary.
We have lived through an excruciating phase of Neptune in Aquarius — that pain being masked by the numbness induced by this transit, the culture of mood stabilizers and $5 cups of caffeine and climate controlled vehicles; the supposedly risk free, sex-free culture of Facebook and “friends are the people you text with.”
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Bridge to the Core.
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Yet Neptune in Aquarius seems to have done something to thaw the hardness of our preconceptions — at least in some folks. Chiron in Aquarius, gradually catching up with Neptune, is pushing many things to the crisis point, such as the state-by-state battle over whether it’s constitutional for gay people to be married to one another. This issue and the mentality behind it have yet to come to a head, but the clay feet may wash out of that extreme hatred and negativity before too much damage is done.
Next spring, Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune meet in a truly magnificent conjunction in late Aquarius (sextile the Galactic Core, to the degree) that will be the true test of what this era has been about. (Neptune in Aquarius dates back to the Clinton impeachment, and Chiron in Aquarius to about 2005. Jupiter has yet to arrive.) To me this aspect is a reminder that whether we are working for personal growth, economic justice, environmental justice or plain old sanity, we have a lot of work to do — no matter who is president. It extends through 2010 and I trust that this will set the tone for the second decade of the 21st century.
Finally, we are entering a long era — seven years — of Uranus square Pluto, astrology that is directly reminiscent of the social upheavals and quest for awareness that came with the 1960s. This aspect goes from Aries to Capricorn, and represents fundamental changes to the structure of society, with changes that touch every single person on the planet.
I recognize that plenty of people have misgivings about Barack Obama. I recognize that he’s a politician. He seems young and he talks a good line. (But if you need to be reminded of our current Orator-in-Chief, click this YouTube link.) And is he electable? Here is a clue. There is an old expression about whether something “plays in Peoria.” That is, will it go over in Middle America, using the most normal place in the universe as a bellwether? I called the Peoria County Clerk the other day and learned that when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama got 65% of the vote in that county and 70% overall in Illinois. Remember that one fact when you’re listening to poll results in this election.
I recognize it’s really hard to get excited about politics, and we have reasons to be deeply cynical. I am with you. I have been so disgusted that I’ve refused to vote since 1992. This time, I am interested because when I look at Barack Obama, I see a guy standing there who obviously has a soul, and I have not seen that on national television for quite a long time. That gets my attention.
There’s just one thing I just don’t understand about last night’s event in Denver — why were all those Democrats waving the Republican flag?
Yours & truly,
