LInk to original article.

Dear Friend and Reader:

IN HONOR of an issue on July 4, I thought I would take a look at the chart for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Independence Day is considered by most people to be the birthday of our country — the moment when the 13 colonies joined together against the King of England and declared themselves free and independent states.

Have you ever read the thing? It’s short, it’s very sweet and it sets an example for the world. The Declaration is the document from our history that sets the goal of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for our nation. It states in part, “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Gee whiz. We need this thing today. Has it expired? It continues, “Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The Framers then provide the candid world with 27 paragraphs outlining the long train of abuses and acts of tyranny, at the end of which the colonies declared that “they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.”

The document concludes: “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

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Editor’s Note: Below is one of Eric’s answers to a reader letter from his Astrology Secrets Revealed series on Jonathan Cainer’s site. It was first published on April 28, 2006. — Amanda P.

Dear Eric,

I believe that one of the biggest challenges we face as individuals or collectively throughout life, even history, is the need to GROW UP.

Maturity is measured by how we treat our existence, our self, and those around us. When I was a child, I thought as a child. I acted like a child; now I am in my 40’s I think like an adult and act like a child. I don’t smash my toys anymore, just my relationships. I wonder sometimes when our collective consciousness will GROW UP; surely the worlds are not waiting just for me! Any hope Eric? Any revelations in sight?

You see, I devoted almost 25 years of my life to spirituality, and now I seem all dried up. I have no job. For the first time in my life Eric I find myself with no direction, no answers and very little spiritual essence. I don’t know what to do, what direction to head in work wise. I have recently started medication for depression; it seems to be helping, at least I don’t cry so much. Just wondering if you can offer some advice or direction from what you see when you look at my chart.

I am about to experience Uranus conjunct my Chiron, and Jupiter in my south node, while Mars heads directly for my Scorpion base.

Thanx Eric,
Christopher

Dear Christopher:

Thanks for making this brilliant point.

Back in the legendary early to mid 1970s, there was something called the Human Potential Movement, and some people figured out they could place a value on reaping the rewards of maturity. The point was not spiritual growth — it was human growth. There used to be a more popularly held opinion that maturity was worth something, and worth working for.

It was by no means universally held, but this idea had its impact all over society as people pushed one another to take greater responsibility for themselves. There exist communities and strata of society today where this is an actively held value; it’s not merely in the past, and I see a lot of potential for the idea developing in the future.

Unfortunately, the prevailing condition is that we live in a society of people who for the most part refuse to take responsibility for much of anything, and who are rewarded for not doing so — ranging from their individual choices to the direction of the world. We certainly live in an interesting time when we are sorting out the boundary between what McDonald’s puts in its food, how much they serve you, how many restaurants they put in your face, and the intensity of advertisements aimed at kids under the age of 2, versus our responsibility to make sane choices about what we eat.

But even if you say, “Oh, I get it, these people are conning me and getting me addicted,” that IS in fact a form of taking responsibility for yourself. Any time you become a conscious factor in the equation, you are taking responsibility for yourself and then you can spread that strength to other parts of your life, and the world around you.

This means consciously acting like something other than a small child in relationship to others. (Transactional Analysis showed us the way: there are three roles we all play, adult, parent and child. Only mature people can relate to one another as adults) It means you don’t just eat what they give you. And it means doing so in a time when very few of us got what we needed when we were actual kids; and when that happens, the tendency to want to stay a kid and recover that missing something can be VERY strong.

It’s always easier to give up on decisions, on challenging issues, and to revert to being obsessed by what is on the surface. It’s always easier to revert to entertainment, and taking your knocks when they come. But some would say this is not as satisfying as consciously working for maturity, and for the strength to make the right decisions. It’s all fun and games until you realize you’re miserable, or you decide you have more important things to do in life than what your parents said you were supposed to do.

I say this recognizing that there are many parents today who strive to teach their children about their right of making decisions and who teach the benefits of independence. But there are plenty of parents who just cannot be bothered at all, or who have no reality framework from which to teach. If you’re a parent, I suggest you keep an inventory of what you say to your child and add up the message.

Apart from parents, there is another force working in Western society, and that is a massive movement for people to surrender their will, their rights, and their minds. The notion that we need to be ‘protected’ from information on a wide variety of subjects is extremely pervasive. There are people fighting and killing in Iraq today who are not old enough to legally drink a beer. Many people feel that nobody is ever supposed to find out anything about sex, even about preventing pregnancy or disease. If you do find out, you’re very lucky.

These things strike me as so regressive, I barely have words to describe how sad and absurd it all is.

Let’s take a look at your chart, because it’s a great example of a peak Sixties chart and also gives us some clues about how transits feel. You’re getting a lot of transits now, more than you would think you can handle, and this is a pretty big time in your life, arguably the biggest yet. I’ll name the transits and describe them a bit — unfortunately at this time I can’t make a fancy chart that illustrates them all explicitly — but I’ll do my best to describe them.

As I have explained in other articles on the 1960s (see Born in the Sixties series), there was a clear pattern that existed from about 1963 through about 1969 and this is the Sixties chart signature. It’s very easy to see in your chart. It all starts with the little red and blue planets on the left, below the horizontal line. There’s also a red and blue pair above the line — but they are part of a different discussion and I will end with a comment on your Mars.

Below the left hand horizontal line (the ascendant) are the planets Uranus, in blue, and Pluto, in red. This is the rare Uranus-Pluto conjunction that, rather explosively, defined the changes and the sense of revolution in the air that we associate with the era in which you were born. As I make a big point of in my Sixties series, when you have this conjunction ‘angular’ — that is, rising, or in the 10th house (for example), it takes on added personal importance and the urge to become and express the values of astrology can be extremely strong. And in the case of Uranus and Pluto, that can mean chaotic.

Now, the Uranus Pluto conjunction did not stand alone. The Sixties signature had two other major defining points: One is that for most of the era, Chiron opposed both planets. Chiron, however, was unknown at the time of your birth, and was therefore not a conscious factor in the minds of astrologers. But it was still very much a presence in the world and in the collective mind, flooding the Sixties with a Piscean energy that came through, for example, in the beyond-incredible music that was pouring out of recording studios and concert halls. You could not have all that music without a Pisces influence.

There was another one, as well: Neptune in Scorpio, which was sextile the Uranus-Pluto conjunction and trine Chiron for a period of several years. Notice how this manifests in your chart: Uranus-Pluto is rising. Chiron (the little key) is in the 7th house (right side, above the horizontal line), opposite the Sixties conjunction. Chiron Pisces 7th is a highly, deeply, widely, genuinely ultra-sensitive position. That alone would be enough to indicate that a person is easily overwhelmed by life.

Last, you have Neptune in Scorpio, which is surrounded by the Sun, Moon and Mercury. Those are the planets in the 2nd house (notice the Sun is the yellow circle with the dot, followed by the Moon, then Neptune in blue, then Mercury in green).

It would be difficult indeed to take the astrology that touched an entire generation, rocked the world and blew a hole in reality, and make it more personal than it appears in your chart. If I were working on the phone with you I would take at least 15 minutes and give you my Sixties Rant, which always includes the recommendation to read the book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.

As a general rule, when the angles of a chart — which means the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th houses and their associated cusps — have planets present, and the closer they are to the lines, and the more of them that are affected, the more intense the life is. You have activity in all four houses (the lunar nodes are in your 4th and 10th). With a chart like yours, it’s not possible to filter out the intensity, either. If we were to take your exact chart and move the birth time by half an hour, we would have a picture of something a lot less overwhelming. In a sense, the aspects would disappear into the unconscious, and they might be brewing around as issues or potential talents you could not see and could not name.

Having Uranus and Pluto angular and so close to your ascendant is nothing short of explosive. You can push people just by walking into the room. You can feel just as overwhelmed. Your very being exudes change. You embody the new order — whatever that is to you — and to do that, you have to pretty much leave the old order behind. Given that the ascendant is where we seek a stable sense of self and a means of orienting on reality, to have these kinds of planets there can be deeply unsettling, and you have to learn to ride them like a wild horse.

Here is a little discovery I just made about your chart, however, which is why it’s always good to have an astrologer with two eyes and a brain look at the thing. Everything of any major consequence points back to Scorpio. I’ll make a little list; see if you can follow along.

— Mercury, the ruler of your Virgo ascendant, is in Scorpio. Mercury is also the ruler of every planet IN Virgo, and you have several: Uranus, Pluto and the Part of Fortune. All refer back to Scorpio because that’s where Mercury is.

— The rulers of Scorpio, Mars and Pluto, are both very close to your ascendant.

— Your 10th house cusp in Gemini, as is your North Node, is also ruled by Mercury. So the rulers of your 10th house, that is, your life mission, and your North Node (another way to say life mission) show up in Scorpio.

— You have Pisces on the 7th house cusp, as well as Chiron, and the ruler of Pisces is Neptune and that shows up in Scorpio.

— You have the Sun and the Moon in Scorpio.

— Regarding the last angle, the 4th cusp, this is held by Sagittarius. That sign is ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter makes a fine opposition to four Scorpio planets.

Basically, whether you look at this chart right side up, upside down, backwards, whether you slice it, dice it or make coleslaw out of it six different ways, everything points back to Scorpio. And you have Neptune mixed up in the whole business, which dissolves boundaries and generally plunges everything in your consciousness under the psychic water, and can have a way of raining subtle to not so subtle psychic and emotional chaos over everything.

Scorpio is indeed the sign of sex, death and transformation. If I was reading your chart when you were a young adult, I would have said: prepare for a life of nonstop change. Deal with how intense you are. Make sure you explore your sexuality. Have a conscious relationship to death. Make your drug experiences meaningful, keep them extremely rare, or avoid them altogether. Besides that kind of ‘look after yourself’ stuff, there is a much bigger point: you must strive to lead an integrated life.

You cannot compartmentalize. You are one person, and all the different ‘departments’ of life that people strive to keep separate you need to experience as one unified reality. This is not easy, because it suggests that work, healing, creativity, sexuality, spirituality, relationships and everything else are basically all ONE thing in your life.

Ah but what else is new? It’s true for everyone, but you lack the ability to have the convenient excuse to divide yourself into a dozen parts. You need to deal with yourself as ONE entity with ONE life. It may seem like a contradiction to say but it would also be very healthy to develop specialties that utilize other parts of your chart and give you a chance to climb above it all. For that, I highly recommend finding out about Saturn in Aquarius. Look that one up in every book. It’s your strongest placement. It’s the very antithesis of all the water sign stuff that drowns you. In such a late degree, it suggests that you’ve got a lot of past life mastery that you can call into action in this lifetime.

Let’s look at your transits, which are something of a natural wonder right now. I hope you have an idea of how intense it is to have a chart where all your planets are angular and the energy of the angles is concentrated on one sign. Now, let’s add the transits:

1. You have Uranus in your 7th house, about to make a conjunction to your Chiron and opposing Uranus and Pluto.

2. Uranus is also setting off the whole Scorpio grand conjunction: it’s making a trine to the Sun, Moon and Neptune and will eventually trine Mercury.

3. Neptune is square itself. That is, Neptune in Aquarius has reached the 90 degree point to where it was when you were born.

4. This is not your first Neptune square; recently it’s been past your Sun and Moon.

5. Jupiter is going over your whole Scorpio grand conjunction now and for the rest of the year.

Um, that’s a lot of transits and they all involved Pisces and Scorpio or its ruling planets. That can be emotionally overwhelming. How you live with these transits is you grow, you change, you do what you have to do — but you do everything you can to live fully. Push the envelope. Take new chances. Take the biggest chance of all and be a little more real every day.

I want to leave you with a question, one which may hold something of the key to your chart. Where does your masculine energy come from? With all the planets ruling angles in Scorpio, with Virgo the Virgin rising and Pisces on the 7th house, where are you drawing your Yang energy from?

The first place to look is always Mars. Mars is in Leo, fiery enough — but it’s in the last degree, suggesting that it’s out of reach or difficult to put to work. The last degrees can be extremely challenging places to have planets. Notice that Saturn is opposite Mars quite exactly, also verging on the edges of its sign, Aquarius. Saturn in Aquarius is masculine enough, too.

But can you feel the antagonism between them? Who gave you your ideas about what it meant to be a man? Who set the example? Who taught you?

It is true, you’re unbelievably sensitive — but you are indeed a man, and it’s time to start enjoying and appreciating that.

Lovingly,
Eric Francis Coppolino

Editor’s Note: Below is one of Eric’s answers to a reader letter from his Astrology Secrets Revealed series on Jonathan Cainer’s site. It was first published on May 27, 2005. — Amanda P.

Dear Eric,

Can you please tell me what it is in a particular chart which indicates a male prefers to dress as a female?

— Wondering Wife

Dear W.W.,

I’m going to start with my usual non-astrological approach: cross-dressing is one of those things that people do.

It is so common that we simply have to recognize that it’s normal — because it’s in the norm.

I’m not saying it’s as common as eating French fries, or that everyone approves; rather, that many people cross-dress, many start quite young, and many do it their whole lives.

For women cross-dressing has always been a sign of liberation and equality. The 19th century writers George Elliot and George Sand, not only dressed as men, but also adopted male names. Their writings achieved great success and they both led sexy, heterosexual lives.

The designer Coco Chanel brought boyish fashion for women to the mainstream back in the 1920s. In the Age of the flapper and the suffragette, women were throwing off the shackles of womanhood by cutting their hair short and donning pants, and for women things have continued this unisex path to this day.

It’s only potentially a big deal when a guy wears clothes normally worn by a woman. This is because when a woman dresses like a man, this is a sign of achieving equality by literally taking on the mantle of ‘the man’. These days, women who dress in feminine clothes are not treated with seriousness, and most often with outright derision. Madonna even wrote a song about it:

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
‘Cause it’s OK to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
‘Cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like
Wouldn’t you
What it feels like for a girl?
— Madonna, ‘Do You Know What it Feels Like for a Girl?’

Still, I can see where it would be intriguing, curious, or even a bit disturbing if your husband wears women’s clothes, and you have not said much about the context of his proclivities.

Cross-dressing is sometimes related to gender identity. Sometimes people do it just for fun. If you’re looking to astrology for wisdom, consider this. One thing that astrology tells us straight away is that we each contain ALL gender identities. Everyone has Venus and Mars in their chart; everyone has the Sun and the Moon. In this respect, astrology takes a radical position. It is in a sense blind to biological gender classifications. All energies are available to anyone. They mix and match differently for everyone as well. We all possess a truly unique gender identity.

Your husband has an absolutely intriguing chart. We don’t have the birth time (though it would be nice), but there is so much to see and feel, we can do fine without it. Look at that concentration of planets. That alone tells us we have an intense and potentially unusual person on our hands. Look at how these planets fall into what are arguably the most feminine and masculine signs (respectively, Cancer and Leo). You just don’t see this kind of concentration every day, and I’ve never seen it appear like this in those two signs.

To make things far more interesting, the ruler of Cancer (the Moon) and of Leo (the Sun) are not just in a conjunction (the New Moon), bringing them together — they are forming an eclipse, a kind of super-conjunction which was exact within mere hours of your husband’s birth. Eclipses will have real impact within a month or two of a birth; he was born right in the eclipse. And, checking my American Ephemeris of the 20th Century, I see that in the summer of 1944 there were FOUR eclipses — two of the Sun, and two of the Moon.

The upshot of this all is that your husband is a very, seriously, majorly intense person. It’s not that he cross-dresses. It’s that he was incarnated with some enormous amount of both male and female energy, of which he is highly aware and feels at every moment, as well as being born with more momentum than an avalanche in progress.

May I suggest you set aside the question about cross-dressing for a while and really, truly make an effort to get to know this person? I can tell you that he’s probably yearning to be known, understood, felt, believed, and heard: there is nothing ordinary about him, but there is quite a lot that is subtle, and as he starts to express himself, more is going to come to his awareness.

You might want to start with asking him what the years 1988 through 1993 were about for him — the untold story. Those were, by the way, the years that Chiron came through Cancer and Leo and touched all those planets, and the transitions and vents around this set of transits will certainly have something to say about the deeper nature of who your husband is, what he is dealing with in this lifetime, and what he needs to express.

See what you find out. I reckon it will be interesting, and most likely quite helpful for your husband to talk about.

“What is needed now, more than ever, is leadership that steers us away from fear and fosters greater confidence in the inherent goodness and ingenuity of humanity,”  — former US President Jimmy Carter

All last week, I looked intently at local, national and specific international events. It’s been both exhilarating and painful to watch the world turn this month. Orlando. Occupy Congress. Brexit. The Supreme Court. But today, I want to share something that’s more from my armchair than from my soapbox. A broader picture.

Even while American women celebrate the Supreme Court overturning a Texas law that severely limited access to abortion, our fellow sisters — new immigrants and their daughters, who lost access to health services because of the Texas ruling — now face larger issues: their very existence in this country. The stalemate in a Scalia-less Supreme Court sent the Obama Administration’s immigrant amnesty program packing back to the lower court; that lower court ruled it unconstitutional, basically nullifying it.

The rise of demagoguery in our politics generates so much id-based reaction against the Other that we’re not quite sure if we’re in the present looking forward to the future, or looking to the past: the anti-immigrant sentiment that fueled the UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s particular brand of anti-immigrant idiocy makes us squirm in embarrassment for both our countries.

People are angry, scared and trying to re-empower themselves. That goes for the white male demographic who feel the fade of their power and influence in every sector of society: witness their need for weapons to ensure we haven’t forgotten they’re still in the same room with us, armed and ready. It also goes for the female demographic rising up towards gender equity in pay, and fighting to preserve our reproductive freedom. It goes for every man, woman and child living in this country “illegally” until leadership figures out how to “manage” the browning of the country in this new century, as well as accommodate the gender fluidity of its citizens.

Feelings are things that cannot be managed, yet they are easily manipulated. Feelings are an ultimate indicator; they are what we use to make decisions affecting our everyday lives on a profound level. Like voting for president or for a referendum on your country’s economic independence.

Here, the problem is that as a Cancer Sun nation we are a feeling entity, and we tend to lose sight of thought. The economic state of the world and our immediate, virtual access to every moment of its existence make us want to distrust and question anything that does not accord with the beliefs we already hold. The information we do get is often not complete, or even true. How can we trust the information we receive?

Furthermore, many pollsters ask how you FEEL about one political situation or the next. Your emotions then inform the potential electorate which way the wind blows, regardless of facts. With the methodology of modern-day campaigning and use of the internet to explore ideas and exploit reactions, the calm coolness of thought usually does not make us rise up and move towards the voting booth. But passion does. Then our reactions become the facts.

The Twitter feeds that help organize massive rallies to Feel the Bern also fuel Mr. Trump’s supporters to throw invective at us “libtards,” and organize American neo-Nazis to rally. Supporters of both sides lurking out there feel the same way: sanctioned because they have allies, and fear-based “fact” behind them.

Yet it’s that same internet that brought us John Lewis and the 24-hour occupation of Congress by Congressional Democrats. It showed us — in the way the Arab Spring uprising did in Egypt’s Tahrir Square — that we, too, can prove “the whole world is watching,” and can make what was once an intractable Congress shift. Even if but a little.

Our country’s Aquarian Moon has great potential for revolutionary ideas and crystallizing them into being. But some of these great ideas have careened past their original intent. We see the results of that. We’re all struggling with the changing of our place in the globalized high-tech world, which has sped up the planet.

Our actions have also accelerated the karmic wheel. Immigrants fleeing the Gulf Wars and climate change are coming to the US; immigrants from economically depressed areas of Europe are seeking economic opportunity in the UK as a result of EU austerity. The result is the same: palpable tension.

Yes I know, it’s all big-picture stuff. But maybe the bigger picture is what we need at the moment. I want my country to trust our thinking Moon to inform our feeling Sun. I want us to be warm hearted and open minded, as we have always idealized ourselves to be. I want us to flush all thought of a small-fingered narcissist in the White House down the toilet where he belongs.

I want us to respond to the world, not react. A good response requires truth, and thought about that truth, with ideas that are clear, well-informed and broad-minded, coming from informed hearts that are compassionate, open and visionary. How much more can we evolve from the challenge of today’s turmoil? How else can we try?

Our thoughts and feelings are ours to own. But the lens through which we view the world, which informs thought and emotion, must be able to encompass the wideness and depth of the world — as well as focus like a laser on its most poignant, individual moments and their meaning. We have the capability to do it. We have to look to make sure we model the best of our thoughts and feelings for others to follow, like John Lewis did. Now more than ever by our hearts and minds we are connected — all of us — to each other.

It’s not every day you get to see one country spark a geopolitical domino-fall, affecting the lives of millions on an entire continent with a single referendum. Yet it happened. Overnight, the “Brexit” vote in the UK did just that. This same vote will lead to other votes that most likely will literally break the United Kingdom apart, with the possibility of more instability to come.

Watching my UK friends and members of Planet Waves’ community go through the shock of yesterday’s EU Referendum, I am reminded of the night that Ronald Reagan was elected. I was in my late 20s, outraged, drunk, shouting in the streets and generally furious.

How could we elect a right-wing savior on the heels of a tax revolt? How could we do that after a successful anti-war movement and the Nixon impeachment? Yet it happened. And we’re still climbing our way out of not only that, but a political movement that’s taking a long time to die. We’re trying to clean up the mess that movement created throughout our government, our culture and the world map over the last thirty years.

To our UK kin: We feel you here in the US. We felt what you feel now after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. It’s a deep kind of grief, only it’s not just personal. It’s mourning for your community, your country and its place in the world, and the frustrating change you’re going to be watching in the future.

The Brexit vote looks a lot like someone shooting themselves in the foot. This time, the shooter is a whole country. London, a global financial center in large part because of the UK’s major player status in the EU, voted overwhelmingly for Remain; but it was “Little England” — outside of London — that shouted its approval to discontinue with the EU, voting ‘Leave’ by 52%.

London as a global financial hub now looks at a future that’s clouded. Scotland will move towards a referendum on Independence (which narrowly lost two years ago) with plans to stay with the EU as its own nation; Northern Ireland aspires to join the rest of Ireland and remain in the EU as well.

Eighty percent of the electorate who supported “Leave” cited the increased wave of immigrants into the UK. The nativism of the “Leave” campaign, led by UK Independence Party (UKIP) Leader Nigel Farage, found a perfect climate in England and a perfect scapegoat in immigrants to gin up fear for (white) British-only economic security in the context of the EU’s sluggish austerity.

This nativism is downplayed in today’s victory lap by Farage and former London Mayor Boris Johnson. But it may be ridden all the way through to an inevitable period of instability of the European region. Things could get very wild — as in, a fascist’s wet dream. France’s Marine le Pen and America’s Donald Trump are drooling.

Austerity, as with any time of economic struggle, is a perfect breeding ground for right-wing movements to flower based on “frustration aggression” — acting out against a scapegoat, whom you blame for your lack of opportunity and compete against for diminishing resources. In the case of an overwhelmingly white UK, Muslim and Eastern European immigrants get the scapegoat role.

The same goes for Mexicans and Muslims here in America, courtesy of Mr. Trump. Trump is using shrinking middle-class discontent and the threat of diminishing white male power in the social and cultural evolution of the Obama Administration to gin up support. This is what got him the nomination for the Republican Party.

What happened in the UK was that Cameron was forcing too much austerity on the UK’s middle class, and did not allow room for his country to regain some vital public services — like its National Health System. The people of the UK have spoken their preference and the majority voted to leave.

As I mentioned, this will likely lead to another vote on Scotland’s Independence and a move by Northern Ireland to join Ireland in full. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland want to remain in the EU. But even the Brexit is not official, yet. Its exit must be approved by mind-boggling bureaucratic processes, and then approved and ratified by EU member countries.

I won’t belabor the point any further over what choices have to happen next, now that this referendum has happened. There’s time for that. I can only feel solidarity with our friends across the Atlantic — and a chill, warning us of what may happen here in November and in Europe in the future. At this point it could be anything; though as Len Wallick suggests in his column below, letting ourselves be ruled by fear is not the same as acting with awareness, and cuts us off from evolution — however messy it may be.

Instead of belaboring points, I raise a pint. Holding you close, friends and cousins. Let’s hold each other through the changes!

Congressional representatives staging a sit-in in Congress is more than unprecedented. It’s unheard of. Yet today, Congressman John Lewis led a contingent of House Democrats to stage a groundbreaking sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives. Their purpose: to demand Congress to act on gun control legislation in light of the Orlando shootings.

This sit-in was led by John Lewis — an American Civil Rights Movement hero — who was nearly beaten to death by police while demonstrating with Martin Luther King. His taking this lead makes this event symbolic as well as historic. Calling his colleagues onto the floor of the House chamber to lead this charge, Lewis came full circle in time, facing a familiar enemy. As a well-known Civil Rights leader he is more than well-acquainted with white men with guns and dogs.

The Second Amendment of the Constitution — the right to bear arms — was ratified in the late 1780s to allow Southern states to quell slave rebellions, which were many at that time. The relationship between Americans and their guns today is based on a single premise: to allow white America to protect themselves and their property from the terror of dark people rebelling against their authority. So embedded is this fear, sanctioned by law, that it has become a mitochondrial aspect of our social and economic infrastructure. And that fear has evolved to include many more targets.

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