Are we ready to plunge back in?
Covid is surging in Asia and South America, but in the USA people are champing at the bit to venture forth, lose our house flab and get our muscles back.
Will this include our mental and moral muscles? We’ll need them, given our state of disunion.
From astrology’s point of view, the current American culture clash is not about polarized ideologies. It’s about the fact that we’re in a steep learning curve, symbolized in part by the Saturn-Uranus square: a conflict between the planet of change and the planet of stasis.
Getting these two into balance is no joke.
It’s tempting but inaccurate to assign one planet to one side of the culture war and the other planet to the other side. It’s true that the GOP used to represent classic conservatism (Saturn): a complacent antipathy to change, sober and rule-bound. But its playbook now includes wild, puerile violence (negative Uranus). And the mainstream Democrats — not the genuine progressives (Uranus) — have re-branded themselves as the party of normalcy: a return to the established order (Saturn), no matter how corrupt.
Also: breakdown
In the background of all this is the Pluto Return, signature of Uncle Sam’s long drawn-out death spiral. The USSR, too, broke into bits under a Pluto transit. This is the planet of disintegration. The pieces of a united entity become disunited.
“E pluribus unum,” a magnificent ideal, thuds on “unum” every day throughout the land. Only law – we’re a polity of lawyers – confers unity on the US, which might sensibly be a Balkans of regional sovereignties had the Civil War not been so awful as to remove that option. – Peter Schjeldahl
Many had expected our current Civil War to wind down, after the decampment to Florida of the oven-baked warlord who used to be president. But it is ramping up. That “rapidly-decomposing husk animated solely by petty grievances” now claims to be expecting a triumphant return to the White House, just as soon as those audits in Arizona et al declare him the true winner. Six months after the Capitol Riot, the vast majority of Republican voters are still with him, fully approving 
the use of violence as a handy little America-greatening tool.
His fans may be delusional, but it’s not entirely clear that Trump himself is. As Amanda Marcotte points out, his conspiracy theories are not so much delusional as aspirational. For his purposes, they’re working.
As for his down-ticket lackeys, they have sworn the blood oath and kissed the ring, making a big public show of sending traitors – Dick Cheney’s daughter, no less — to sleep with the fishes. At all levels of government, power alignments have consolidated. There’s no more hoping-against-hope for wobbling GOP consciences.
Red-state governors have the bit in their teeth with anti-abortion laws and voter suppression. Tired of pussyfooting around, they’re decriminalizing vehicular assaults into crowds of BLM protesters, penalizing social media companies that ban white nationalist posts, and using the 1619 Project as a bogeyman to froth up the racists.
It looks like the system is not going to graciously self-correct.
Pluto problem
At least, not in the sense of returning to the country’s pre-transit form. Per Plutonian Law, things that have reached a certain level of toxicity must thoroughly break down, allowing the rot to surface. If there is to be a healthy rebirth, 
the person or entity must grit its teeth and look itself in the face with merciless self-honesty, as in the 12-step program.
Biden’s recognition of the Tulsa riots was an example of this. It was a historic announcement, squeezed into manifestation by the Lunar Eclipse of late May. As a symbolic gesture, it hinted at the possibility of national regeneration.
But the decay/rebirth process is not a straight line. Dying and regeneration overlap. Here in mid-2021, America’s degeneration phase is in full swing, as evidenced by a couple of other Eclipse-week milestones: the 137 lawmakers who chose to cover up rather than investigate the Jan 6th attempted coup, and the former National Security (sic) Adviser Michael Flynn, calling for a new, improved coup.
This time, a military one.
Neptune problem
On one level, astrology would characterize this moral and political mess as a Jupiter-Saturn problem. On a deeper level, it’s a Neptune problem: a mass failure to distinguish between reality and unreality. 
In theory, the antidote to a takeover of Neptune (paranoia, hypnosis, mob mentality) is to sharpen up the conscious parts of the chart. This is tricky, in our case, because of the media saturation of American culture. A lot of people have surrendered their instinctive sense of right & wrong (Jupiter) and their capacity to think critically (Mercury) to one or another faction of the hive mind (Neptune).
But if we don’t want our inborn intelligence to sit idle and atrophy, we need to reclaim it.
Self-informing
In a world roiling with mortal crises, we would ideally be looking to teachers and elders to help us interpret our times, as the ancients did. But in the age of the internet we have exchanged knowledge-seeking for information-devouring.
At least in the case of social media, we’ve started to recognize that we’re being played. We now know about the MAGA disinformation campaigns and Ukrainian ‘bot banks.
What’s harder to see is the distorting power of normal, everyday media. We’re too immersed in its worldview to realize it’s a worldview.
But to maintain an independent mind we need to understand how the mass media works us. To notice, for example, how it trains us to dismiss wars and catastrophes faraway – even when our own hard-earned taxes pay for them – as being just too complex to understand.
The foreigners who went to Afghanistan …couldn’t see the complex reality that was in front of them because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer. And this blindness led to a terrible disaster – support for a blatantly undemocratic government, wholesale financial corruption and thousands of needless deaths. … Adam Curtis
To keep our minds agile and strong, we need to resist being corralled into one side or the other of the media’s pro forma playing field. Faux-liberal or faux-conservative; Anderson Cooper or Tucker Carlson. 
There’s tremendous pressure upon us to conform to this binary trope. We may even feel a creepy sense of vindication when we hear a despicable public figure saying something predictably despicable.
Such as hearing that Marjorie Taylor Green sided with the war criminals in Israel during the massacre in Gaza last month. Unconsciously, this makes us feel secure: if our enemy’s consistently our enemy, we know where we stand. We can settle in.
But what if both sides are wrong?
Fed up
That Lunar Eclipse last month brought a whole slew of global dramas to a head. It was also that week that the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko forced the landing of a commercial flight in order to nab a dissident.
Perhaps you read about it in the “leftwing media,” and found yourself in satisfying agreement with the morally outraged anchorman… until you remembered that the USA did the same thing to Edward Snowden in 2013, a glaring parallel that was omitted from the anchorman’s script.
So what do we do if the conventional news industry is more industry than news? Where do we put our allegiance, if both sides are controlled by the same handful of government-supported plutocrats? What if its two polarized wings are just a marketing ploy, feeding each algorithmically-identified demographic a steady stream of separate-but-equally-bowdlerized narratives?
What if the candidate environmentalists voted for continues his sordid history of caving in to the fossil fuel giants? What if the anti-war demographic felt they had no choice but to vote for a major architect of the Iraq war?
What if a progressive hero like Mark Ruffalo is forced to apologize for calling the Palestinian genocide a genocide?
What if we find ourselves agreeing with someone whose other opinions turn our stomach? Does being against the medical-industrial-complex put us into the same camp as the QAnon fantasists?
What if we’re as fed up with the blame-drunk woke-itude on the Left as we are with the dumb-as-rocks death cult on the Right?
Muzzled
On the face of it, it’s easier not to trouble with these doubts. Easier to just choose a team and cheer/ curse ourselves hoarse. Considering complexities is psychologically destabilizing.
But that’s what these transits are for. Especially the Saturn-Uranus square, which uses destabilization as a teaching tool. Peaking through December, the square exposes the compromises we’re willing to make to our personal freedoms, and to those of society at large.
It’s a great time to go with the journalistic outlaws: Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Jelani Cobb, Michael Brooks, David Graeber et al. These thinkers remind us of the original meaning of < media >: that of mediating between facts and public understanding.
It’s no accident that they get muzzled by both left and rightwing media in equal measure (Saturn = censorship, Uranus = free speech).
Case in point: Emily Wilder, the AP reporter fired for her pro-Palestine tweets, also under that Eclipse. A few days before that, Matt Taibbi, another truth-teller who has to watch his back, came out with an expose on the firing by Apple of Antonio Garcia-Martinez, author of a ripping takedown of Silicon Valley.
Truth is relative
We must not forget, either, that even clean media needs our skepticism. As astrologer Frederick Woodruff reminds us, every truth is relative, especially under Saturn/Uranus:
Today I read where Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is beginning to wobble. And might be ‘wrong’. …This is yet another perturbation within the consensus field of facts.
If we want to refine our intelligence, we can’t simply imbibe other people’s ideas. We can certainly be inspired by them, but we need to keep our own discernment switched on while we listen and learn.
Mercury, the planet of curiosity, is retrograde right now, in Gemini (self-informing), the sign of its rulership. Let’s use it to revitalize our minds.
We owe this to ourselves, and Goddess knows, to the times we incarnated into.
