By ERIC FRANCIS from Next World Stories, published in January 2009.
So here we are.
Where exactly? It seems like a few people have noticed that in the geography of time, we’ve arrived at a mountain pass in late autumn. On one side is what they are calling over in our Sci-Fi section the “Age of Denial” or maybe it’s the “Age of Fossil Fuel Folly.” On the other — if we get there — is something else.
Astrology and astrologers have their ways of describing the moment we’re in: Pluto in a new sign, two mighty planets are at opposition, and something weird called Chiron is making some big moves in Aquarius. Indeed, we are heading into the most impressive Aquarian alignment since 1962, when the world was at the cusp of another new era. Ours has been gradually forming since 1998, when Neptune arrived and started the process with a little anaesthesia.
The Mayan daykeepers tell us that we are just over 1,000 days from the end of the 13th baktun on Dec. 21, 2012.
Scientists observing the polar caps have their way to describe what time it is, as do geologists looking at oil reserves, the people selling the oil (over and over) and those measuring the carbon in the atmosphere. Politics has its way, too, and it would seem that most people are defining this as a political moment: a new president taking over, apparently very different than the old. That he’s African-American is no small part of this: this inauguration is one of the great moments in civil rights history. A black man will face hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC not to demand his place in society, but to take it as the chief executive of our nation. If you believe the polls, even half the people who voted against him feel good about that.
Barack Obama gets my attention for one reason the news hasn’t given a name: we are being presented with a different image of maleness than we’ve seen in quite a while. We are used to Tom Cruise and Arnie Schwarzenegger and guys with guns in both hands who run up the wall and do a flip.
Do we think there’s a connection between Obama’s alive sexuality, his coherent mind and the fact that he’s never been in the military? Do we think that his use of actual words, sentences and fully-formed thoughts will have an influence on our nation’s young? I guess Bush may have been a positive influence as well. I am sure a lot of youngsters looked him and thought: I don’t care if they have me on three drugs. There’s no way I’m that fucking stupid. Personally, I found it embarrassing to be a male during the time when he was our nation’s First Man.
As for Barack, I’m pretty sure he’s not psychotic. I’m not a shrink, I’m a fortune teller. But the guy seems fine to me. The most disturbing thing about being confronted by a Bush or a Cheney or Rumsfeld was the insanity reeking into the room, oozing out the remote control and into the digital recording gadget in the cable box. Madness. Murderous madness. Early in the Bush War era I was looking for an analogy to illustrate Dubya, and it was: a father goes out, kills the next door neighbors, comes home bloody, sits down to dinner and the family doesn’t say anything. The family would be us.
And there is still blood everywhere, particularly on our generation’s hands. We didn’t elect George Bush, but we did basically go along with his rampages, and those rampages are not over; we are standing in the ruins of whatever vision for the nation we thought he would deliver us or what evil we thought he would save us from or what money the Carlyle Group could make doing so. While we were looking at the supposed enemy abroad, rights were curtailed at home and the banks were ripped off (as the Framers warned about).
Fueled by the red and the black.
Cindy Sheehan was one of the few to stand up and speak up. Keith Olbermann has spelled it out simply as well, taking enormous risks telling the truth on a network like MSNBC. There have been others, powerful voices, but for the most part they were not our voices.
When we did actually get a chance to speak in an election that was being watched too closely to steal, we picked a guy whose mind felt whole rather than one whose mind felt fragmented. To me the most disturbing thing about John McCain was that he seemed shattered. Not necessarily mean, but just…not right. That does not do well under stress; the stress of decisions and the weight of the future.
The weight of the future.
A metaphor saying that we have to agree to carry something, a burden, and take it forward. This is different than optimism. It’s different than hope.
Not optimism or hope, but something else: the feeling, that sense, of collective soul. You know what I mean? We reached a point where it became okay to care. True, history will look back and say, of course we changed political parties in the year that 2.1 million people lost their jobs and that the banks collapsed and millions got kicked out of their homes. What do you do, re-elect the people who profited from this? Remember, we didn’t elect them in the first place — we stood back as they took the country and treated it with as much respect as teenagers would treat a stolen car.
I am sure everyone picked up this permission to care their own way: maybe just as an unusual sense of excitement. In my case, it was rage. For others, part of their lifelong quest for civil rights. Maybe as a little guilt or feeling dorky for not letting yourself be part of it. Maybe resentment, those Obama people had a lot of fun. Many people were a little extra excited about the fact that we knew we were working together. That was the thrill you couldn’t ever buy, to me. A great mass of society moving, as individuals, in a common direction. It felt like riding a bike, only with a lot more people, almost as conscious. We need to remember this feeling, and learn what it is, and learn how to get there. The feeling is a group initiation. It’s a moment when personal choices add up to the movement of the whole society in a positive direction.
It may take about a thousand more of these to get us where we need to be. But it will only take one revelation to get us on the right path. The turning point may have already passed, but let’s not count on it.
So far as I can see, we are not in a political moment or an astrological one or a time when the government-corporate complex is getting restrucured. We are in a moment of growing up; of taking responsibility for our existence on the planet, even though we cannot fully take responsibility for being here in the first place. But lo, we are indeed here. You, me and the rest of us.
In such a space, we can become capable of thinking not just about our own futures, which would be impressive enough; we can open up that part of our mind that can think beyond the limits we see.