{"id":5646,"date":"2008-11-12T18:00:46","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T23:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=5646"},"modified":"2008-11-12T18:37:15","modified_gmt":"2008-11-12T23:37:15","slug":"the-big-goodbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/the-big-goodbye\/","title":{"rendered":"The Big Goodbye?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

I’VE BEEN SPENDING this last week after election night trying to catch up on some rest. As many of you who have been blogging with me this past week know, I feel as though I’ve been processing this year’s campaign through my immune system. I was working out the stress of accumulated worry over whether or not we would have the same old, or would we be bidding farewell to that phase in our history and moving on to a new chapter.<\/p>\n

\"Breakfast<\/a>
July 23, 1967: Reagan, Glenn T. Seaborg and Nixon at breakfast at Owls Nest Camp, Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre campground owned by a private San Francisco-based men's art club known as the Bohemian Club. In mid-July each year, the Club hosts a three-week encampment of some of the most powerful men in the world. The feeling of the place was documented in the poem, "Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants" by Robert Bly, first published in The Nation in 1968.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In an op-ed called “Goodbye to All That<\/a>” Atlantic Monthly’s conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote in what would be a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama, that his candidacy (and now his presidency) signalled the possibility of the long-awaited end of partisan politics and the culture wars born from the 1960s and the Vietnam War era. He said:<\/p>\n

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war\u0432\u0402\u201dnot so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo\u0412\u00admentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade\u0432\u0402\u201dbut the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war\u0432\u0402\u201dand about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama\u0432\u0402\u201dand Obama alone\u0432\u0402\u201doffers the possibility of a truce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a member of the latter half of the Boomer generation, I was in eighth grade when Richard Nixon beat Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for the Presidency, elected on the premise of ending the Vietnam war started by the Democrats. His election ushered in the new era of post-Kennedy Republican conservatism — strong on foreign policy and moderately generous in social programs popular in the sixties. At the time, George H.W. Bush was Congressman for the state of Texas, and Ronald Reagan completed his first year as governor of California.<\/p>\n

The Vietnam era ushered in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush brand of conservatism, bringing us almost half a century of Republican rule in the White House, which finally ended, at least for the Bushes, last Tuesday night. It completed itself not only with the landslide electoral vote victory for Barack Obama as President, but also with the losses of John E. Sununu, Republican Senator of New Hampshire, son of former George H. W. Bush’s White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu<\/a>, and North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Senator Robert Dole<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This will be the first time since 1952 that neither a Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Dole or anyone from that school of conservatism will be in the White House or the Capitol Building, ending a long chapter of power in Washington D.C. It was with that generational group, most of them “made” through World War II, that most of the 1960s culture wars were waged between the forces of the Establishment and the counter-culture. But with their passing, and Obama’s win, is this really as Sullivan suggests the end of the culture wars that sprung from the Vietnam Era? I think not.<\/p>\n

Even as Obama prepares to ascend to the Presidency, we’re reminded all too painfully from the reactions at republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s rallies of the dark heart of racism that still exists in this country. California’s Proposition 8, which denies same-sex couples the right to marry is another form of that dark repression, trying to contain the fruits of the civil rights and the feminist movement to end sexism which started in the 1960s and flowered in the 70s. As a heterosexual woman, I am reminded that this initiative, like all the others I have watched in my lifetime, says “only procreative sex between married heterosexuals matters to the state.” Roe v. Wade<\/em> remains a cultural and social lightning rod as Obama eyes Supreme Court appointments.<\/p>\n

In Cosmos and Psyche<\/em>, Richard Tarnas said that even as we pass through historic cycles of revolution, repression, conservatism and rebellion as well as the reaction to these cycles, these phases don’t just end. We all carry within us the marks of those phases of time. We are now in the center of the gears called Saturn and Pluto, turning like the largest wheels on the clock, with Uranus coming intermittently to trip these wheels to a slightly different trajectory, moving the machine of the cosmos ever forward by the fuel of dynamic tension. In fact, here is a money quote from Tarnas’ book:<\/p>\n

Saturn-Pluto alignment periods are also characterized by displays of personal and collective determination, unbending will, courage and sacrifice; by intensely focused silent strenuous effort in the face of danger and death, by a deepening capacity for moral discernment born from experience and suffering and by transformation and forging of enduring structures, whether material, political or psychological.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though I am enamored of Sullivan’s sentiments in “Goodbye to All That,” in my heart of hearts, I know we’re in for a longer battle than that which started from post-Vietnam polarization. We’re in a struggle between forces that want to maintain the stability of conservative ideals rooted in the past versus those who see and feel the need for cultural, sexual, racial, environmental and economic breakthrough. It’s the battle between the imperial and the egalitarian, and a war between the morally certain and the spiritually unbound.<\/p>\n

In order for us to evolve, to move the machinery of humankind and the world we live in forward, the operational word is and must be forward, in spite of each upset. Forward, instead of every attempt to scream, bully, shout and create ballot initiatives to stop the movement of human evolution. Forward. For some, there has been a “goodbye” to the racial and cultural expectations we fought against so hard in the 1960s and 70s. For others, the struggle remains for women to safeguard their self-determination for their bodies, and for equal rights for human beings of all gender persuasions to pursue their happiness and security openly within society.<\/p>\n

Even though a setback like Proposition 8 coming on the heels of an historic Obama victory makes us see that “Goodbye” might be premature, and we look warily at the battles ahead of us, we are marching through time with even more determination, more tools and less likelihood of wanting to stay stuffed in closets or shouted down by bullies on talk radio and threatened by bombing at family planning clinics. Because we have tools like the internet to organize resistance. Because we’ve got time, we carry the fight inside us as we move through the generations. And because we’ve got us, joined by love, we’ve got this promise of one day, seeing the fruits of the transformation and the forging of a new evolved structure of being for humanity, which waits for our willingness to claim it in our sights.<\/p>\n

Rest period is over. Gotta move. It’s time.<\/p>\n

Forward.<\/p>\n

Yours and truly,<\/p>\n

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

Dear Friend and Reader: I’VE BEEN SPENDING this last week after election night trying to catch up on some rest. As many of you who have been blogging with me this past week know, I feel as though I’ve been processing this year’s campaign through my immune system. I was working out the stress of … 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":[1,533],"tags":[36,560,52,546,436],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5646"}],"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=5646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}