(This is a post script to my New Moon posting, below.)

I watched the quarter Moon in the darkening sky as the speakers’ voices rang out. Tonight we marched again down the streets of San Francisco in support of the besieged people of Palestine, this time to protest the ground invasion that had just begun. It has been seven days, a clean quarter cycle, since the ominous New Moon of 12/27.

There are many horrors occurring all over the world at the first square of the lunar cycle; but this particular horror has America’s name on it. Israel has the fourth largest military in the world. Palestine has nothing; nothing but a determination to survive. And behind Israel’s campaign to eliminate the million-and-some people whose land they have occupied for 60 years is Uncle Sam, for whom Israel plays the role of junior partner. American taxes paid for the cluster bombs dropped on that hospital today.

Imagine what the good folk of the USA, if they had the full information at their disposal and a sufficient sense of their own power, might have chosen to buy instead, with all that money.

Our elegant new president was asked last Friday about the bloodbath in Gaza. He declared that if his daughters were in danger of having bombs dropping on their houses, he would defend them as — wait for it — Israel is defending itself now.

Now, Obama is a very smart man. Very well-informed. He knows, as well as any of us who get our information from other sources than the mainstream news, how grotesque a falsehood it is to portray the walled-in, wretched Palestinians as the aggressors in this massacre. He knows, just as people of every other country in the world (except the USA and Israel) know, how to interpret the fact that the death of one Israeli has led to the death of 450 Palestineans in one week. But there he was, saying those words, parroting the nonsense, pimping his immense popularity to perpetuate a propaganda campaign that is, as my friend put it, a bulldozer more powerful than Israel’s 200 nuclear warheads.

Thus is Pluto in Capricorn introducing the theme of the next 16 years: leadership as we have known it is over. Following along after an authority figure like starry-eyed little children will not hack it any more. We are entering a post-father-figure era. Obama’s dreadful pandering was as much of an omen as the New Year war crimes to which he was referring. No leader, no matter how charismatic, no matter how vastly superior to the toxic clown he’s replacing, can take the place of an individuated populace alive with self-awareness. The Uranus-Saturn opposition overhead echoes this idea. The global superpower of the years upcoming is not a politician, nor any one person; it is an informed citizenry. As we make our way to the Full Moon of January 10th, we must begin to realize that we are on our own.