By the very title of my column — Fe 911 — it’s been my assignment here to provide an antidote to the shock doctrine we’re continually bombarded with culturally, politically and socially. Some days, these shocks come faster than usual. These last two months in particular we have seen more than what we’re used to, and perhaps even more than what we should bear.
I have been keeping vigil on the blogs like a watch in a ship’s crow’s nest. The ongoing investigation into the handling of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida stays high on my radar. The promotion of even more stringent laws in state legislatures curtailing women’s reproductive freedom keeps me transfixed. I am looking for the trends in the Supreme Court arguments as they rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare. These three current and seemingly disparate events are and continue to be the loci of the present-day Uranus-Pluto square in America: the struggle to provide equal justice under the law regardless of race; the struggle for a woman’s self-determination over her own body; the struggle to define the role of government in the life of the individual. These are historical flash points spanning three centuries of our country’s history, spilling over into the fourth.
Trayvon Martin and the current crop of ultrasound laws are the reverberation of the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements from 160 years ago when Uranus was conjunct Pluto in Aries, returning again with the civil rights movement of the 1960s when Uranus was conjunct Pluto in Virgo. Our current drama surrounding the Affordable Care Act is the third in a series of aspects that began with Roosevelt’s New Deal while Uranus in Aries squared Pluto in Cancer in 1930-34, then proceeded with Medicare, approved by Congress during the conjunction of Uranus and Pluto in Virgo in the mid-1960s.