May 2010
A Call to Action
A new warrior cycle begins on May 27th. For the first time in 84 years, Uranus is going into Aries, the most courageous sign in the zodiac. Are you ready to act upon what you know to be true?
Uranus will form a significant corner of the Cardinal Cross, a world-altering configuration with many peaks between now and 2015. For about half a year Jupiter will be orbiting next to Uranus, putting a bellows to the flame. ( See box at right for more information about my Lecture series on these transits)
Jupiter and Uranus will create leaders and heroes.
They will help us wake up, fast.
Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction
Uranus and Jupiter conjoin every thirteen years. This time we’ll get a series of three exactitudes that begins on June 8th, 2010, and extends through January 1st, 2011. Only the first hit is in Aries, and it will probably make the most noise. The other two hits will probably usher old issues to the fore again, such as health care reform in America and the tribal political warfare that flared up around it. 1
There will be those who receive the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction as an infusion of vigor and alertness, like the exquisite tightrope walker in the documentary “Man on a Wire.” Those sensitive to this transit will be inspired to precipitous acts of independence, like the artists and visionaries to whom we look for moral, intellectual and artistic leadership, like Bill Moyers, Diane di Prima and Peter Joseph . A spotlight of public visibility (Jupiter) will be focused upon those thinkers for whom the era is ready (Uranus).
Aries is about activism, which we may define as the urge to act in the service of life. Jupiter (social reform) and Uranus (genius) will inspire in many people sudden cravings to engage in the outer world.
Then there will be those who will manifest the puerile side of the conjunction. In the absence of spiritual maturity the forces of pseudo-populism are likely to be excited even further than they have been. In the USA we have been seeing a kind of mob mentality, characterized by a wildly ideological fervor (Jupiter) and a highly selective notion of individual freedom (Uranus).
Two-Step Process
There is a lot of talk among astrologers and other big-picture thinkers about the need for radical change during the Cardinal Cross years. But in order to begin to apply this rather abstract idea, we need to think about it as part of a two-step process:
1. We need to wake up to what’s happening in the world.
2. Then and only then can we act to change it; in whatever large or small-scale ways our chart indicates.
The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction will be a shot in the arm where both steps are concerned.
Denial
Denial is the norm in the modern industrialized world. The system could not survive without it, and it has so far been very effective in keeping the most incongruous realities in place in the supposedly educated West.
America’s Tea Party enthusiasts are the latest embodiments of this sorry state of affairs. They indulged in a veritable orgy of denial during America’s health care wars. Instead of calling out the role of the insurance industry and the corrupt politicians — from both parties — that these companies finance, they have been misdirecting their righteous rancor onto those positioned a notch or two beneath them on the social ladder: the uninsured, the undocumented and the indigent.
Taxes, too, loom large in the rhetoric of these folks. So one would think they’d have found it newsworthy that, this past tax day, most of America’s big corporations — after earning staggering profits in an economy in which everybody but themselves is suffering — paid virtually no taxes at all. This is business as usual, of course. It is no secret that a web of loopholes written into law by corporate-sponsored Congressfolk protects America’s biggest industries from paying even a smidgen of their fair share. But again we might wonder: why aren’t the red-white-and-blue crowd up in arms about this?
The answer lies in what they are — and are not — hearing on the radio and TV. In the case of corporations not paying taxes, they’re hearing almost nothing. And what they are hearing puts the emphasis in quite the opposite direction.
Last month, under the Dark of the Moon leading up to tax day, Fox News –- number-one in viewership among the cable networks — aired a story about that great threat to the civilized world, the welfare mother. Tens of millions of Fox viewers watched as news vans full of intrepid reporters descended upon the modest dwellings of a couple of random families so poor that they pay nothing in taxes .
This is who you should be angry at, audiences were told.
Divide and Conquer
Divide-and-conquer strategies have a long and ignoble history. Thus have the few at the top maintained their control over the many at the bottom since the advent of hierarchical social orders. Since time immemorial, emperors and kings have successfully drawn their subject people’s attention away from the injustices they suffer by inciting popular wrath against witches, Jews, heretics, dark-skinned people, the poor, “suspected terrorists’… whatever Other was handy.
But we have an exponentially more insidious situation here. Because of the reach of the corporate media in the contemporary world, public opinion is being manipulated across greater swaths of humanity than ever before. It is manipulated not with royal edicts backed up by the gallows, but under the innocuous guise of information dissemination; the most egregious example being Fox, which gets away with calling its ham-fisted propaganda “news”.
Dollars for Death
There is also entrenched denial about the global economy, and the way countries spend what’s left of their money. Most of us harbor an understandable resistance to thinking about the fact that, right now, every country on Earth is in debt to some other country. Most of the governments of the world’s “developing” nations (the term is anachronistic in this era of systems collapse) are completely dysfunctional, and systemic bankruptcy is on the rise in Europe.
But in most of the Western world the middle classes are expecting things to get back to normal. Which begs the question, what do we mean by “normal”? My sense is that most folks who hold this expectation also hold an awareness — more conscious in some, less conscious in others; but still, an awareness — that the world is irrevocably changed by global warming, resource depletion and a new kind of warfare that is borderless and endless. Yet despite being aware of these game-changing scenarios, the expectation still exists of a return to the familiar ways: mass-polluting consumerism in an economy set up to fund the powers that perpetrate asymmetrical military campaigns.
So long as the collective mind is still caught in this strange cognitive dissonance, the government and its media arm are not about to change their ways. Despite the hype around “greening”, the amount of resources being pumped into systemic change is paltry, whereas the amount being pumped into the same old places remains stable, and seems quite as acceptable to consensus thinking as it always has been.
The most flagrant example of this blind acceptance is the USA, whose people allow more than half of their tax bill to go to the single most impoverishing place a country’s resources can go: the military. Despite the fact that one pole of the political spectrum is waxing apoplectic about spendthrift government, and the other pole is presumably still opposed to endless war, both remain bizarrely silent about these gargantuan expenditures. Amidst all the brouhaha about the economy, the citizenry en masse seems not to realize that the surreal amounts of money they spend on death and destruction dwarf in magnitude any other part of the national budget.
While public fury is directed at petty Congressional earmarks, and while parks are closed, schools and hospitals shut down, public transit gutted and even jails emptied out for lack of funds, 720 million dollars a day continue to pour unabated into war. And the vast majority of Americans don’t bat an eye.2
Seven hundred and twenty million dollars a day. Without factoring in this stunning figure, it is clearly impossible to see the current recession in perspective. If a serious discussion about the economy were truly the object here, we would expect this statistic to be discussed at anti-tax conventions, to be taught in schools, to be broadcast on the news.
But this does not happen, thanks to the telecommunications industry; whose skewed information fits the needs of the government of which it is an organ. And given that our government is itself an organ of the military-industrial complex, there’s little chance of our hearing about that 720-million-dollar figure on the mainstream news. Even such august media organs as the New York Times rarely mention the costs of war. Information like this stays locked away in a repressed little closet of the public mind.
Over the years ahead, it will be harder and harder to avoid looking at realities like these. In time, the planetary invitation to break out of denial will become a summons.
Monkeys
Those who sang the praises of the Age of Aquarius back in the day may recognize, with a sudden sense of recognition, that these are the times we heard were coming. We who are alive now can be an active part of it, which means contributing our unique skills to the universal attitude shift that wants to happen. (What are my unique skills, you may ask? Look at your chart. It’s all there.)
Or we can play the old “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” game, where “evil” means “truth.” The trouble with that option is that it does damage. It harms others and ourselves, in body, mind and spirit.
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Notes:
1 The purpose of retrogradation is to give us a couple more shots at understanding what the issues in question were really about.
The second and third exactitudes of this transit feature Uranus in Pisces (chaos, universality) again, opposed to Saturn in Virgo (health) again. See Dena de Castro’s piece on this in The Mountain Astrologer, April/May 2010.
2 It remains to be seen whether the peace movement will remember how disillusioned they once felt about Obama’s escalation of the bloodshed in Central Asia , where civilian casualties continue to climb.