26 April 2010

Iran, The Pope, The Sign of Aries, and You

as appeared in The Huffington Post (22 March 2010)

It may come with or without the famous Sondheim, click, shock phone jingle and door knock, but something is coming. Something big. Astrologers call it the crossing of the planet Uranus with the beginning or zero point of the sign of Aries. It hasn't happened in more than eighty years, not since Hitler and the Great Depression were just about to hit the papers, so it is definitely going to be huge.

And It will certainly annoy the cojones off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Annoyance doesn't even begin to describe it. It will be way more irritating than sand in his lubricant, that's for sure. This planetary aspect is all about revolution, or at least rebellion, which will erupt abruptly by the month of May. Aries always symbolizes the spirit of independence, the indomitable urge to exist in spite of any obstacle. It is the unbridled desire to live openly, freely and honestly, and in many cases, that means anger. It is a fight against any and all repression that has come before. When it hits, people get pissed. It is a time when all the truth that has been hidden comes out. Explosions of emotion can no longer be concealed or suppressed. Everything that has been denied is revealed. Obviously this is not good news for poor Monsieur Ahmadinejad. He is Capricorn Rising, so his whole being is going to be devoted these days to putting out fires and quelling disobedience. His whole house will most likely be in an uproar. Not only are many young people in his country in the mood to give him the royal finger, but, with Uranus in Aries in the fourth house of his astrological chart, there will likely be rebellious children right there in his own family.

This planetary configuration will also have the Pope swilling Maalox back in Rome. He's got to be popping his cork now as well. He needs to remember that the genie is out of his own bottle, too. He was born with the planet Uranus right at this same point, so he can expect gigantic eruptions that will probably spray directly all over him. He is going to have to open the whole abuse thing wider than anybody would believe and wider than he would like to see happen. In fact, the whole issue of abuse and consensual sex will arise within in the clergy as will his personal need to expand the Church's view on the foibles of human behavior. He may blow a gasket, himself, but he's going to shock everybody.

How does this affect you and me? Well, if you live in Tehran, it is going to get really hot there in May and not only on the thermometer. Upheaval and unrest and the President's effort to squelch the noise will put you under strict watch. It you are a Catholic (and God forbid a priest), you are going to have to speak up or forever live with the guilt of not defending the rights of people to live openly and honestly, yourself included, mainly because you will have to look at all the times you took Communion after shamelessly shattering Commandment after Commandment.

And everybody else? Uranus at the Aries point will whack us all in the head. It would not surprise me one bit if some regular Joe who has lost his job after twenty years and whose health insurance won't pay for his wife's chemo after the same length of time he's been paying he premiums, just loses it, goes absolutely wild and attacks a CEO of a major corporation. He'll probably be labeled crazy, but deep down everyone will know he is merely acting out the wishes and feelings of half the people in the entire world.

Each one of us will be hit with the urge to rebel against whatever regime or life style we feel has been holding us down or keeping us back. The trick for the Iranian people, President Ahmadinejad, The Pope, Catholics everywhere and all the regular Joes and Janes of the world, including you and me: to integrate the irrepressible urge to live completely new, free and independent lives (true anarchy) into a social regime that demands order. This is a revolution that will define the term terrorism . Is terrorism actually the inevitable surfacing of rage on the part of those who perceive they have been repressed way too long? Or Is it merely mad and wanton destruction of a peaceful System?

United States politics until now...

...United States politics from here on

THE PLANET PLUTO NOW: A HISTORY LESSON

It's been a hot summer. Really hot all up and down the eastern coast . On some days the breeze was warm and gentle along the river in New York. Down in Virginia, however, and even as far north as Massachusetts, it baked. Hard to find a cool spot on some days.

There is a rumbling among the people, and not merely the heat that is shortening their tempers. People are getting restless. They are worried. Upset. Uneasy about what is currently transpiring. Nothing they can put their finger on yet, but still, uneasy, as if they feel in their bones that something is going to happen. Something has got to happen.

Farmers are worried, too. They are nervous about their crops, of course That is normal. They dread another dry summer without rain to grow their produce. But that is not all that plagues them late at night when they seek to find rest from their wearying toil. Taxes have been steadily rising and the government has been making it harder for them to realize any decent profit at the end of the season, and if the weather doesn’t cooperate, many are going to be forced to move out of rural areas into already crowded towns, where they lack the skills necessary to survive. They have families, though, and between taxes, government intervention and weather problems, they may be forced out of business.

Business people, too, are extremely restless. They are vastly more politically experienced and motivated, so they are a great deal more aware of what has been going on not only here, but in Europe. Many of them have been across t he Atlantic. They see what is taking place in France and England, and t hey are all too painfully aware of how deeply in jeopardy we are over here.
Those who are blessed with the good fortune to discover a sunken Spanish galleon with tons of gold coins are rare, but others of us are not economically safe any more, and the business folk and property owners know it. They are not sleeping well at night at all.

Land is still a prime force for prosperity, but property ownership is not what it once was. Again. Taxes. Taxes and more taxes. The poor people think the rich have so much money they don’t have to worry about the government dipping its hands into the pockets of wealthy individuals. How wrong that is. The rich and the prosperous are keenly aware of the dangerous situation in which this great land finds itself at this present moment.

Dangerous because lately people are coming together with new ideas–new ideas the government loathes. Lately there have already been serious problems of intervention on the part of the government with regard to the individual rights and liberties of citizens who, up to this point, have been loyal to the mother country. Certain people, however, who have lived proudly in this land for generations, are beginning to be unhappy with the fact that they are less and less able to verbalize their discontent.
People are being squeezed both financially and morally. Under the guise of protecting its citizens, the Powers That Be have demanded more in coin and loyalty than many people are being able to bear. It is becoming harder and harder to live a life of prosperity and plenty and fulfill the promise of the generations who came here before and bravely endured years of privation and struggle in order to live a better life in a new and better world. It is becoming more and more difficult to feed the children and guarantee them a promise of a better future.

Not only because the government is taking the food out of our mouths and filling the pockets of the fat government cats who continue to get fatter off the spoils of hard-working people, but who also insist they must continue to support us against enemies they are convinced are savages we cannot hope to live with in peace and harmony, just because we worship in such totally different ways from the way they do.

And no matter how much they insist that religious freedom is what created the colonies in the New World in the first place, religious persecution is rife in this land. There are God-fearing folk who are forever defending themselves against the heathens, although those often called heathens by the God-fearing folk, claim on their side to have a better respect for nature and protecting and loving the land we have come here to live on.

The greatest reason, however, for the restlessness and discontent that ripples through the countryside today is the fact that human rights in this country are being trampled on. The Greeks and Romans had developed many sophisticated philosophies regarding individual liberties and the rights of each person to pursue a life of choices and happiness. We need to turn to them now.

What seems to be happening is that such notions are threatening the very government that is supposed to protect such ideas. The Government believes that it is wrong to voice discontent, wrong to criticize the policies that oppress the people, wrong to question where the tax money of the citizens is going and to what use it is being put.

We the people of this land are beginning to ask questions and we resent being resented or even censured for asking those questions. We do not want our rights trampled by what we perceive as blind royalty. We are becoming upset with the fact that we are asked to be silent when we see inequity and injustice all around us. It makes us uneasy to be called traitors because we find fault with those who are supposed to lead and protect us, but who are in fact seeking to bleed us of our resources for their own purposes, fill their coffers and their war chests from profit they glean from the sweat of our toil. We are growing ever more feverishly resentful when we are forced to give up our own profits to a System which is becoming ever more distant and remote and alienated from us. Most disquieting of all. we are slowly seeing that eventually a confrontation must occur, a philosophical and moral confrontation that defines more clearly who is the loyal citizen and who is the traitor.

As any avid and devoted student of astrology and the movement of the heavens would agree, could there be the presence of a distant planet coming now to the last degrees of Sagittarius is bringing all these complex issues to a head? We can no longer tolerate intolerance, repression on the part of rulers who have become increasingly insensitive to the needs of their subjects and citizens.