{"id":54788,"date":"2012-03-22T17:49:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T21:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=54788"},"modified":"2012-03-24T11:14:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T15:14:19","slug":"america-what-time-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/america-what-time-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"America, what time is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

America, what time is<\/em> it? Where are you now?<\/p>\n

I’m sure many of our international readers might be wondering why am I asking my own country these questions. But I know many of you are looking at the news coming out of America wondering not how or why we have lost our way, but how and why we have lost our minds.<\/p>\n

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Lately it seems our country has forgotten what time it is. Not just the minutes and the hours, but the years and decades.\u00a0There are some here it seems who are obsessively focused on an America that existed roughly around 1960. A time when civil rights was a whisper at cocktail parties, and women’s choice and reproductive freedom were not openly discussed.<\/p>\n

On Feb. 26 Trayvon Martin, a young black kid not more than 17 years old, was hounded and gunned down by a “gated neighborhood watcher” vigilante named George Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman thought the bag of Skittles and can of ice tea Martin was carrying was a deadly weapon, and felt threatened enough by Martin’s presence to follow him as he tried to walk to his friend’s house for a visit. He chased him down, and ultimately shot him. It took three days for Trayvon Martin’s parents to be notified of his death, and another three weeks before his killing became national news. <\/p>\n

The police of Sanford, Florida where the shooting took place, have not arrested Zimmerman, citing that Zimmerman was acting legally under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law,<\/a> which sanctions shooting someone you suspect could harm you. Even though the Department of Justice has initiated an investigation into the incident and a grand jury will convene April 10 on the matter, to this day, Zimmerman has not been taken into custody or charged with the shooting.<\/p>\n

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There are a lot of politicians around here who are obsessed with what’s happening with our vaginas, wondering how they can be controlled. Each day American women wake up with some new version of control from Republican-led legislatures across the country that, as one blogger puts it,<\/a> finds us “with a Republican between our legs”: trans vaginal ultrasound wands inserted unnecessarily, aspirins between our knees, and Rush Limbaugh threatening women seeking to protect reproductive freedom with scarlet letters across the bandwidth of\u00a0national hate radio.<\/p>\n

As a woman and a person of color, it’s hard not to feel both deflated by and scared of this trend in our current events. That politicians, getting the cue from the 2008 Republican Presidential campaign and the rise of Sarah Palin, feel now in the 2012 campaign that they have the permission to conjure mob hatred, fear, prejudice and misogyny because it makes them electable. What the hell, it works. The mob in turn, feels they have permission to give their darkest instincts room to grow. Enter George Zimmerman. Enter Rick Santorum.<\/p>\n

I was about to write — ‘this is not the America I know’, but I stopped because that isn’t true. This IS the America we know. These people are OUR neighbors, our friends, our family, our spouses. These feelings have been here as long as our history as a country. Underneath our self-anointed sense of global exceptionalism and thus entitlement — paid for by wars and profiteering — the roots of intolerance and oppression thrive.<\/p>\n

In a comment by zerosity under “A Tipping Point into Emergence” a few threads down<\/a>, there was a link to a blog called “The Bard’s Grove<\/a>.” The blog notes that the ocean “represents the power of our collective emotions.” It is “a force we have to contend with now — the power of the Waters (Neptune, the oceans) to overwhelm both our shores and our fragile psyches \u2013 or to heal us.”<\/p>\n

I agree. In the darkest heart of our country, we have unfinished business and emotional debris that needs more than clearing. It needs to be removed from our public discourse and cultural consciousness forever. The legacy of slavery and oppression has been mollified by law but not bulldozed out of our collective destiny. In order to begin to heal, we need to see the darkness for what it is. We need to open the bandages and see the wound in all its festering glory: state legislatures writing laws making it allowable for a woman to be arrested for using contraceptives; the criminal justice system unequally meting out justice in cases of white against black homicide — this is a snapshot of the concerns of a country which just four years ago elected an African-American President of the United States.<\/p>\n

The cycle of change created by the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s meets its greatest challenge in the current square between these same two planets, which we’ll be watching as it evolves and reverberates over the next three years. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. It’s been coming for years, and now we meet its face, unmasked in all its racist, women-fearing splendor. There is only so much outrage I can tolerate, and I think, I hope, a growing number of American people feel the same way.<\/p>\n

What time is it? Where are we now?\u00a0<\/span>The reason\u00a0<\/span>I’m asking my country for the time is not to get us to admit we’re in the 21st century. We already know that.<\/p>\n

I’m asking for the time because the alarm is ringing. It’s time to wake up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America, what time is it? Where are you now? I’m sure many of our international readers might be wondering why am I asking my own country these questions. But I know many of you are looking at the news coming out of America wondering not how or why we have lost our way, but how … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54788"}],"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=54788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}