Brothers Under the Skin

Friday’s New Moon (9/18) is no standard-issue New Moon. Up in the sky right now four planets are gathering together in opposition to Uranus.

This grouping gooses up the ongoing Saturn-Uranus opposition, signature of America’s red-hot culture wars. The opposition reaches exactitude five times, and the hit today — Sept 15th — is the most critical of the five. The world body is quivering with the tension between two energetic poles: that of a white-knuckled holding on to the past (Saturn) and an explosive, liberating leap into the future (Uranus).

New Moons are always about getting another chance. Virgo is about tweaking and problem-solving. While it’s true that the stakes are stringently high right now, it is also true that the task at hand is really quite humble and down-to-Earth: we’re just being asked to think up workable solutions. The transits above are no longer about fist-pounding ideologues shouting each other down (they were until recently, but no longer). The question now is “What could actually work here?”

We are being invited to put our cudgels down and look at things in perspective.

In this regard, I wonder about the ire that drives the more vocal participants in the health care “debate” (using that word for these dogfights feels wrong. It gives a bad name to those civil exercises we engaged in in high school, with their gentlemanly protocols and their strict rules about supporting arguments with facts.) I am curious about the generalized fear and loathing of “Big Government” that seems to be the central theme raising the blood pressure of those good citizens protesting health care overhaul. Are we to understand that the older members of this group spurn all Medicare reimbursements that the government gives them to pay for their blood pressure meds? Do the younger ones boycott state colleges, because accepting an education from Big Government rankles their libertarian pride?

As in most places, in California there’s a whole lot of poverty, especially inland. This poverty is insufficiently, but consistently, assuaged by welfare checks. Are we to assume that these hard-hit communities — which are populated, by the way, in overwhelmingly greater numbers by GOP-votin’, gun-totin’, government-mistrustin’ folks than they are by “liberals”– hold their noses while accepting the food stamps their government provides?

These contradictions have been getting a lot of air play lately, and I am sure they have inspired a list of angry rebuttals to suit. More compelling, I think, is a deeper tier of irony; one that gets mentioned less often in the media reportage of this rhetorical civil war.

It remains unmentioned because it involves the potential of common ground between the two sides; that is, between those never-the-twain-shall-meet camps that the pundits have divided us into. Given that a united citizenry is our corporate-run government’s worst nightmare, it stands to reason that we won’t find the debate framed this way on the evening news.

So let’s take a crack at it here.

I refer to the fact that many of us not in the “Obama’s-a-socialist” camp share with those who are a profound distrust of what goes on in Washington. Hundreds of thousands of us have marched in protest of the gargantuan chunk of our tax money that goes to fuel the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; not to mention the dirty little secret wars elsewhere, for which our spanking new president has extended his loathsome predecessor’s “unitary powers” — the license to spill as much blood as he chooses for whatever reason he deems prudent.

Has it occurred to you, too, brethren from the Right, that the money that’s been poured down the death pit of Iraq could have bought health insurance for every man, woman and child in the USA? And a degree at a four-year college to boot?

Like you who have been raising the roof at town hall meetings, we too cry foul — for example, when we hear about Washington’s holding people indefinitely without charge and subjecting them to extra-legal “interrogations” that fly in the face of the U.S. Constitution, a document held in high esteem by members of both camps.

We, too, protest the unimpeded reach of a government that, to this day, maintains the right to eavesdrop on our phone calls, read our emails and peek over our shoulders when we check books out from the library. You feel outraged about immigrants benefiting from the social services your hard-earned tax dollars paid for; we get just as outraged when we think of our taxes paying for the murderous services of Blackwater mercenaries.

True, we might not get quite as exercised as y’all when it comes to the idea of government- managed health care. But in other regards, we could bring to the table a truckload of umbrage against the workings of Washington DC.

Will you join us in the streets, o town hall spleen-venters, to stop the sabre-rattling against Iran? Will you raise your cries with ours, brothers and sisters, to protest the bailouts of Wall Street kleptocrats ?

Shall we link arms under these revolutionary skies?