Dear Friend and Reader,
IN 1845 AMERICA, long before primaries, Super Tuesday, endless debates, in-your-face spin rooms and pundits; long before even the Republican and Democratic parties we know today were formed, founding fathers scheduled the Presidential election to happen on the first Tuesday of November.
When they decided what day Presidential elections would take place, America was an agricultural nation. Taking time away to vote before the season ended would have disrupted the harvest. November, the first month after the harvest and before winter came, was an appropriate time.
Here is your text book answer to the question:
Why in November?
Most Americans made their living from agriculture in 1845 and Congress felt that November was the most convenient month for farmers and citizens living in rural areas to get to the polls. Preparing fields and planting crops consumed lots of the public’s time in the spring and summer months. But by early November, the harvest was over in most areas, and the weather was still mild and dry enough to allow travel over the dirt and rock roads of the day.
Why on Tuesday?
In 1845, and for many years after that, only the county seats had a polling places. For many voters, this meant at least an overnight trip on horseback or buggy. If the election were held on Monday, people would have to leave on Sunday, which in 1845, was reserved for church.Why the first Tuesday after the first Monday?
Congress wanted to make sure the election never fell on the first of November. Nov. 1 is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Roman Catholic Church (All Saints Day). In addition, many businesses tallied their sales and expenses and did their books for the previous month on the first of each month. Congress feared that an unusually good or bad economic month might influence the vote if it were held on the 1st.
In the mid-19th century there was plenty to do in terms of life and death survival for Americans across the continent. Managing the land, tending it so that it could produce food for the lean season, providing for your family — all a vital act of self-preservation before winter hit and scarcity came.
Our agrarian past and its tie to American politics has lost some meaning in this day and age of virtual democracy, YouTube and Facebook, but not totally. American politicians still hold life and death in their hands each time they lift up their Blackberries to take a call from a lobbyist on K-Street, discuss energy policy with a diplomat overseas or a send word to a general in the fields of Afghanistan or Iraq. That we have come so far from being simple farmers to wielding power over the world, making life and death decisions for not only us but the planet has been simultaneously our privilege and sacrilege-in-progress.
This coming Tuesday we once again tilt the globe and make the decision, looking a bit like Hamlet contemplating Horatio’s skull: “To be or not to be?”. This Tuesday, with the world at an edge environmentally, socially and geopolitically, we are faced with a truly Scorpionic choice of life over death. Are we going to be stuck in our dangerous scorpion exoskeletal instincts? Will we act with our fearful, sex and survival-only lizard brain? Or will we have the perspective of an eagle? All these animals are attached to the sign of Scorpio. One of these animals will actualize their presence, ruling in the form of the human, near the season of the Water-Bearer at the time of the Inauguration when our ruler is in essence, crowned.
The world is smaller by its own design: accessibility to each other a cellphone flip and a text message away—all the way across the planet. We can talk to each other on video on our computers from Emeryville, California to Prague in the Czech Republic with satellites miles overhead broadcasting our images. Google Earth is now our instant display of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) for the planet, and the arsenal to mess things up forever is still available. These late falls and early winters have gotten warmer and drier and who knows how much longer the polar ice cap can hold or how long hurricane, typhoon and monsoon season will last this next year?
This time we Americans are called upon to feel the spiritual force of this season of reaping in our hemisphere as true citizens of this planet, not just this country. We need to feel this with a stronger sense of obligation beyond our collective lizard brains. We’ve had our time of selfishness, aggression, megalomania and greed. We’re also capable of a great generosity and magnaminity. At this moment, the rest of this planet and its people require us to be even bigger and more magnanimous than before. We need to answer with humility instead of arrogance. Will we climb out of our scorpionic exoskeletal shells in time to recognize we need to evolve?
Horatio’s skull is looking at us. To be or not to be? Winter is coming. All our survival is at stake.
Yours & truly,
Fe Bongolan
Gardener writes: “So what happened in the 80s? What went wrong?”
I got two words for ya, baby: John Lennon.
That stupid, apparently random killing took down one of our most important Friends. And not just John. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Yoko is stone-cold-nuts most of the time.
That was a fairly intense interruption of the planetary heirogamos, and like GWB with his little 9/11 imprint, it was designed to demoralize and dead-end us.
But then there was another little twist (well, several, but this is a taste): The 6th Floor Museum got built in Dallas. This was from an initiative spearheaded by James Hillman called the Dallas Visions Project; my first writing mentor was a friend of Hillman’s, so he was invited onto the DVP. Ollie Stone got wind of the project as it was being planned and began organizing the film on the spot. Upshot: All of that denial, shame, guilt and yes, fear started being worked through.
As it will… hang in there. (And blow Yoko a kiss, y’all. She’s still reeling.)
M
Blessings Mystes,
they are viewing it as an underground economic dodge, so want to impute income from the produce. We really are still serfs in the kingdom. What I sell at my local farm market is taxable as income because I operate a business, which will doubtless be matched by my expenses – so I’m not likely to owe. But to tax someone’s kitchen garden is beyond reason. I’ve about decided that the reasonable person rules don’t apply to members of congress. Eric mentioned the garden tax in a past column. We will have to be alert during the coming years, to fight it.
I usually try to avoid the use of the F word. I think it carries too much shadow material (punishment ) and most peopel use it as a curse word, which is how I contributed to the downturn in conversation this morning. Apologees to all dream lovers everywhere who are basking in radiant glow.
but back to the subject, in the 70s we already knew what needed to be done to save the planet. That is when earth day and OSHA were both born. We bought bicycles to conserve energy and I even used cloth diapers to refrain from filling the landfill with dirty plastic diapers.
The 60s was when everyone pointed out what was wrong, but the 70s brought a very healing vibration.
So what happened in the 80s? What went wrong?
Sigh…
::Fuck:: I do so love that word, where it swings wildly on the hinge of blessing/curse.
As an enthusiastic ‘fuckee/fucker’ myself, I’d like to take a moment to bask in its ambiguous glow.
Feck, too.
M
p/s A tax on *gardeners* and gardening? or just for re-sale? Again: pick a charity, and start giving. Like fucker/fuckee, it can be taken or you can give it. I think this is called a ‘choice.’
I don’t know what everyone else is doing, but I am trying to live on my soap and vegetable earnings at Farmer’s Market. Well, if I didn’t have my retirement I’d have been on the street by now. I have to carry one million dollars liability insurance on the soap, the cost of the oils and essential oils is astronomical, I use quite a lot of ink with my printer, and paper products are expensive. People don’t like to see you handle their veggies and fruits so you have to use plastic gloves, and the legal requirement for handling greens/lettuce is to handle them with plastic gloves. When I do my taxes, I’m plumb sure I will have lost a lot money – most of it going to business entity taxes, supplies and insurance! I’m interested in how Genevieve works it out.
What we have recently learned is that a lot of the seed companies no longer plan to carry horticultural heirloom seeds because they do not want gardeners to be able to save their own seeds! Not only that, but our own congress wants to assess a tax on gardeners too (Eric mentioned it this year)!
Fe you called it right! Fuckers!
mystes:
I remember the late seventies and 1980 as the mudslide into oblivion. Started with Jonestown, then the killing of Harvey Milk, the Iran hostage crisis, and finally Reagan.
We were living under a bad sign that we’re struggling to get out from under.
Fe says: “We should have started this 30 years ago, before Reagan was elected. Now we have to undo the mess he started. Fuckers.”
I don’t know about you, but I was warned. The day after Reagan was elected I was sitting in a cultural anthro class, my professor looking like someone had hit him upside the head with a tire iron. His words: “Okay, kids, this is it. The shitting has begun…”
I promptly moved to Mexico. Had a nice little chat-up with the Bruja who more-or-less *is* the Valley of Atonga (where Quetzalcoatl was born), and realized that no matter where you go on this *very* interesting planet, the Aeons are under the impression they’ve got it sewed up.
Boy, are they in for a surprise.
Keep on knitting, my doves. It’s the ‘unravelling’ that takes us there.
mystes:
Lucky to be living in the region I live in, and having a job. Lucky I can knit a sweater, and cook my own food. Lucky the weather is milder here. Especially lucky I came from a background where scarcity was the ghost in the backroom. Thank my Depression and war-era parents.
The idea of taking us beyond ourselves and into the next iteration is critical. The library of resources to cope with what’s going on now and will happen because of it needs some new inventory.
We should have started this 30 years ago, before Reagan was elected. Now we have to undo the mess he started. Fuckers.
Fe, honey…
Good question re: the scorp/snake/eagle Scorpionic energy. And it blends nicely with the economic-legacy questions percolating elsewhere in this blog. Within your *own* being, who is going to actually define how to make a ‘living?’ and how do you deal with the ancestral “(0)h N(0oo), not *starvation*!!” that bubbles up from the lineal cauldron? I watched with some interest as Genevieve announced her departure from the Land-o-Wage Labor, I am curious to see how she makes the transition.
How are any of us doing it? What kind of survivalist mentality will slither out, demanding to be reckoned? Can the eagle learn to let the scorpion and serpent ride on its back? Or will the three keep jockeying for pride of place?
Me, I’m heading back to the root. Stay with the fear (at some point all of us have to deal with the fact that *we are* someone else’s ‘shadow material’ too) till it ripens into Freedom.
(freedom to *love,* silly… like there’s any other kind…)
M