“I stay awake at night, wondering what kind of world I will leave my granddaughter.”
That’s what my best friend of many years — an African American woman — said to me the other night while sitting together at her kitchen table. It’s a familiar scene of our friendship — laughing, drinking a “couple of fingers” of Knob Creek, pondering the state of the world. Tonight, we hear Sam Cooke singing “What a Wonderful World” on her player. We and many others fought hard for the time that allows us tonight to sit together at that table like we’ve been doing now for close to thirty years.
Time is a river that sometimes lulls, though often moves like white water rapids. We’re from the Pluto in Leo generation, Boomers — highly idealistic, believing we could — and did, change the world. For us, the rivers of time were fast. We drew on the inspiration of students in Paris protesting the French war in Algeria, horrified by the Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire to protest the French regime in Indochina. The years 1965-66, the last time Uranus was exact in its alignment to Pluto, were followed by our own forms of campus unrest in the United States over the war in Vietnam.
Throughout the years 1960 to 1972, the long arc of Uranus-Pluto’s last conjunction revealed itself. It flowed with the breakneck pace of change: pressure by the people created the Civil Rights Movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, the environmental movement, Roe v. Wade, the War on Poverty, Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. We know from these efforts — where in some cases lives were sacrificed — what lives were changed and saved, ultimately saving the future. It is now this list of hard-fought accomplishments that form the checklist for everything corporations, religious conservatives and the interests benefiting from the military industrial complex are working tirelessly to erode and dismantle.