Editor’s Note: This is the Judith Gayle weekly Political Waves from Friday, June 4, 2010. She is featured each week in Planet Waves Astrology News. This week we will be highlighting her writing with one new post each evening.
By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.Times They Are A Changing
–Bob Dylan
Saturn and Uranus oppose each another in a clash of Titans, reminding me that I wore flowers in my hair in Golden Gate Park long before the Summer of Love, feeling the energy dance on my skin like fireflies sparking off light. That was before the drugs went bad and the ghetto-fires raged, before the snipers loaded their rifles and St. Ronnie the Reagan told us that hippies looked and smelled like Cheetah, before the establishment decided that kids were the enemy, before the churches began to howl about taking back American values. Even when it all went viral, the air was electric with purpose and determination. And while this isn’t the Summer of Love, Part Deux, perhaps it’s the cynic’s version.
Those were days when we had supreme confidence both in ourselves and in our ability to impact the world. We believed in the vote, in the Constitution and the American system of checks and balances. We had respect for science that took us to the Moon, and medicine that gave us the first heart transplant. Television was benign, and news still showed actual pictures of war deaths and protests against them. We gave a slight nod to militarism at its leanest and meanest, but considered Vietnam an egregious example of exploitive empire building. We cracked open politics to get a good look at its dark underbelly. We marched through the haze of tear gas and threats of baton-wielding cops to make our voices heard. Our American Dream was more about freedom’s potential than its actuality, even as we took advantage of the liberty that citizenship provided us. We had no idea how good we had it.