{"id":36017,"date":"2011-03-22T16:16:13","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T21:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=36017"},"modified":"2011-03-22T21:51:51","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T02:51:51","slug":"children-of-the-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/children-of-the-bomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Children of the Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who, in their right mind could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine? <\/em>”
\n-Lucifer, played by Al Pacino, from the film “The Devil’s Advocate”<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whether or not you believe in the concept of heaven, hell,\u00a0God or the Devil, Al Pacino’s Lucifer was right. Today’s snapshot of the planet looks a lot like a product of\u00a0the Faust legend. The story of Faust, upon which\u00a0“The Devil’s Advocate” is based,\u00a0is\u00a0a 500-year-old cautionary tale of\u00a0the consequences of a\u00a0handshake with the devil —\u00a0exchanging one’s soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust was a bored scholar, striving to reach the very limits of knowledge. His quest was a journey of desire to know all and experience everything. At the ultimate moment of full knowledge of the world and all its secrets and pleasures, Faust pays the ultimate price — his soul is dragged into hell by the devil.<\/p>\n

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The 20th century represented a milestone in technological advancements as well as how many ways we kill ourselves, intentionally or not. We’ve had two world wars. We’ve seen conflicts waged to end empires, and revolutions fought to escape the crush of the\u00a0industrial wheel. We’ve seen new empires rising with the same agenda as the old. We’ve witnessed genocide and the\u00a0poisoning of our\u00a0air, water and earth. We’ve also had\u00a0light bulbs, the telephone, air travel, radio, television, the microchip, computers, space shuttles, microwave technology, high-speed rail\u00a0and the internet. Each one of these inventions revolutionized not just industry and technology, but the way we live. Yet, life on the planet is losing the battle for survival\u00a0as we move further into the 21st century.<\/p>\n

The last big invention in the world — a concept that would have world-changing implications — was the internet. That was nearly 20 years ago. The same technology that gives us all global access to information and\u00a0facilitates national and regional revolutions is also\u00a0the same medium for Nintendo and Wii, which make and sell\u00a0games for young people based mostly on violence.\u00a0Twenty-first century children now have a choice of battles against demonic forces, zombies, super-criminals, some kind of post-apocalyptic survival, dancing tiger cubs or fairy Barbie. What message are we conveying to the future?<\/p>\n

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This century carries\u00a0with it\u00a0as baggage\u00a0from the previous century\u00a0an arsenal that can kill millions in a stroke of a pen or push of a finger. As we attempt to move away from world wars, we seem to be a little lost as to\u00a0what to do with this moment in time. Particularly now that we are striving to\u00a0recycle the\u00a0same\u00a0ingredients for bombs\u00a0as an energy resource in peace. Where are we going?<\/p>\n

I was born after World War II, making me part of the Boom Generation born around or after the second hydrogen bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. That makes me\u00a0a child of the bomb, born in the nuclear age. My first memories as a child were those of watching television coverage of the Cuban missile crisis. The only thing I could understand with my six-year-old mind was that we were in some kind of danger, the scale of which I could not imagine as a child. Yet I know my next memories were those of always searching for safety.<\/p>\n

There is cellular and psychic distress on the body from war. My mother had it.\u00a0I was born prematurely, incubated and weak. I remember\u00a0her screams at night, waking from nightmares reliving Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. I remember the sound of my father’s voice, trying to soothe her back to sleep. These memories\u00a0echo through\u00a0me like a charged wire.\u00a0Sometimes when I remember, my throat tightens.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0individual damage\u00a0created by wars over a prolonged period of time has to leave a generational mark, a kind of\u00a0 psychic wound. That wound — the\u00a0sense of peril and an overall loss of safety\u00a0that\u00a0makes us yearn for\u00a0the mega-dad, the superhero\u00a0who makes bullies go away by force —\u00a0stays inside like an internal scar. We grow up and become what our parents and grandparents\u00a0were, carrying over and perpetuating cycles of generations past. Violence, war and weaponry have become part of\u00a0our culture as much as our inventions have brand names that we use as nouns: Kleenex, Tampax, Sony,\u00a0Playstation, Shock & Awe, and Glock.\u00a0It’s limiting our view and our imagination of what we can be truly capable of.<\/p>\n

In Goethe’s rendition, the most famous of all the Faust legends, Faust is saved from God’s wrath by\u00a0his constant striving for happiness and accomplishment — with the help of\u00a0the heroine Gretchen’s pleadings with God on Faust’s behalf. Faust was saved from utter damnation by his striving for good and\u00a0acknowledging the power and forgiveness of the Eternal Feminine.<\/p>\n

This planet is a she. That means she is a womb. We may be children and grandchildren of the bomb, but we are also all children of this womb. We teeter on the edge of a great fence of invention that can take us either to heaven or hell on Earth. And unfortunately right now, bombs are louder than whispers. There are so many voices much softer, gentler and insistent that there’s another way to go; they’ve been saying this throughout time, including the\u00a020th century and into the 21st. Will the planet, our mother, forgive us for our errant striving? Only if we learn from our mistakes. I’m not sure if any woman, much less\u00a0the Great One on which we live, can take much more. There is no fault in imagination. The challenge is imagining ideas that rock the traditions based on violence and greed that now wound us to the core. If we are to dream, we can and\u00a0we must free ourselves from our own self-imposed hell.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,<\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan
\nSan Francisco<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who, in their right mind could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine? ” -Lucifer, played by Al Pacino, from the film “The Devil’s Advocate” Whether or not you believe in the concept of heaven, hell,\u00a0God or the Devil, Al Pacino’s Lucifer was right. Today’s snapshot of the planet looks a lot like a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36017"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}