You could see from his face what a good man he was.
Each detail that emerged about Alex Pretti’s life and death was like an icepick to the heart. It felt like our brother had died.
He was a caretaker, murdered because he came to someone else’s aid. His death was desecrated further by bald-faced lies from a regime now committed to untroubled and automatic dishonesty.
Neptune, governor of grief and selflessness, is at work externally and internally. It is permeating American society, giving us martyrs and madmen. In its guise as chaos, it is atomizing the rule of law (Saturn).
And it is at work within each of us, penetrating into our consciences like the cold mists of winter.
Paper tiger
The soulless husk of a man in the Oval Office is not doing well. At Davos, his threats fell apart like a paper tiger in water. Europe called his bluff on Greenland, and Mark Carney stood up in front of the world and told the truth. 
Trump was trumped. He realized he’d better come up some new grand international gesture or he’d end up king of nowhere but Mar-a-Lago.
So he changed the subject, low-level-Gemini-style, announcing a replacement UN: the “Peace Board.” (I propose we put quotation marks around Doublespeak like this. Let’s refuse to pretend the words mean what they say.) He’d pack it with war criminals and anoint himself Chairman for Life.
And he’d distract from his humiliations in Europe by doubling down on the violence and suffering he perpetrates at home.
Cosmic puns
The Universe puns. Consider the great conjunction overhead: Saturn (freezing) + Neptune (water) makes ice. Just as these two planets began their duet last summer, the paramilitary thugs known as ICE began to break into the headlines.
The transit’s placement in the US chart offers up another bit of cosmic gallows humor: it falls on the I.C. of the US chart: ICE without the E.
And there’s yet another layer. The I.C. (imum coeli, or bottom of the sky) of a birthchart signifies homeland, foundational security. That’s our “Department of Homeland Security.”
Waking up together
But there is a shift in the air. Saturn and Neptune have re-entered Aries (1/26 & 2/13, reaching exactitude on 2/20.)
They are operating against the backdrop of the long transit of Pluto in Aquarius, signifier of the power of groups.
Pluto broke old models of leadership to smithereens during its passage through Capricorn (2008-24). Now that we’re in Aqua mode, lawmakers aren’t going to lead us. We‘re going to have to lead them.
And now we get this conjunction in Aries, the sign of the warrior.
It’s is also the sign of bullies, of course. Like our emperor-wannabe, who wanted a Pretorian Guard like Julius Caesar, but instead got himself a squad of flying monkeys, armed with military weapons and more funding than most countries’ whole armies.
Moral clarity
The overcompensating man-boys answering his recruiting call must love the idea of playing out video-game-style violence, with no consequences. This type of person is emboldened by Aries transits. But the rest of us may seek a higher level of the archetype: that of the martial artist.
Which version of Aries will we commit to?
We are coming out of fifteen years of Neptune in Pisces (2011-2026), an era of mass confusion. The wired world has been pacified by a great digital fog machine, leaving us barely able to discriminate between validity and folly. At the same time, the Trump Reich has enshrouded us in a toxic miasma, tempting us, at every turn, to give up.
But now the fog is lifting. There is a sense of moral clarity in the air.
Confrontation
Low-level Pisces is passive and slippery. Cultural leaders have been slithering around Trump like fish, despite knowing full well that things were hideously wrong.
We have seen cowardice and appeasement from politicians, media, universities. Billionaires have lined up to give him gold trinkets. They put on their tuxes and showed their grinning faces at the VIP showing of Melania’s joke of a movie, mere hours after Jeff Pretti was shot.
All of them trying to maneuver their way around the mad king.
But Pisces time is coming to a close, and maneuvering isn’t going to work under these skies. Aries is confrontational: the perfect antidote for a Pisces’d-out populace, a third of whom remain stuck in cult-like stupefaction, and the rest of whom are exhausted from disgust, rage and grief.
Feel, then act
To recoil in horror at the Minneapolis murders is an organic, appropriate response. It means we’re allowing ourselves to feel Neptunian empathy. It means we’re in tune with ourselves. We’re letting life in, even the painful parts.
And then something else can arise. Once we allow ourselves to feel, we become able to act. Now we can access the heat and vigor of this extraordinary historical moment.
Aries is the most courageous sign of the twelve. Sure, it’s sometimes impulsive and brash, but it can cut through bullshit like nobody’s business.
Decisive moment
To make the most of this stunning transit, let’s not waste time hazarding predictions. The planets are not here to answer our questions. They’re here to ask us questions.
Are we going to be complicit, or courageous? Aries demands decisions. Do we identify with the Minneapolis citizens who are taking to the streets with whistles around their necks, ready to warn their neighbors that the gestapo is nearby?
Or do we identify with the murderers of Jeff Pretti, the inconvenient do-gooder who got in the way, and Renee Good, the mouthy lesbian who deserved what she got?
Will we sigh and shrug it off when we see the images of a five-year-old boy dragged from his home and strapped into an ICE van? Or will we tap into our unique reservoir of gifts, and come up with a creative response to what we are seeing?
Think of the imaginative souls who immediately made little Liam’s hat into a meme. That small artistic gesture is now resonating throughout the cyber
sphere, churning up a contagion of empathy.
“Don’t look away.”
Martial artists all
In the face of these crises, many of us get stuck spinning our wheels with the question But what should I do?
A better use of our energy would be musing upon the question beneath it. Why am I alive right now?
This is the question we ask ourselves all our lives, of course. Astrophiles address it by looking to transits to tell us the particular way to ask it, at any given time. The time we’re in, right now, is aflame with the the first degree of Aries, the spark that sets off the zodiac. Look for it in your chart.
It’s where the call to take responsibility (Saturn) is coming from. It’s a portal leading into the part of ourselves that knows – has always known – what’s decent and true (Neptune).
It’s inviting us to open our throats and sing, fiercely.
