I was caught by this week’s cover of Time magazine — a black and white photo of a young African American man being pursued by a large contingent of police in riot gear. The cover’s title reads: “America 1968” with the “1968” struck through and replaced with “2015.” It was a snapshot that would probably make Richard Tarnas, astrologer and author of Cosmos and Pysche nod in rueful agreement.
For me, Time‘s cover was a reminder that no matter how far we’ve advanced economically and technologically, there has been little distance from the problems we faced almost 50 years ago.
Whether that young man was from Baltimore, Ferguson, New York or Oakland, the stories start looking alike, and there are way too many of them. Freddy Grey’s Baltimore, literally and figuratively, has been on fire a long time — since the late 20th century and the War on Poverty: blue collar industry collapse, income inequality, a disaffected African American community prey to drug wars and the War on Drugs. One wonders after all the unrest over this last year alone that someone, somewhere, could start making the correlation that the cause of America’s urban unrest is systemic.
And yet Washington, only 40 miles away, is so focused on ending gay marriage, starting a war with Iran and forcing full-term pregnancies on rape victims that it won’t smell the smoke. During an interview last week on CNN, Wolf Blitzer tried incessantly to position Baltimore community activist Deray McKesson into saying that Baltimore’s protests should stay peaceful, to which McKesson responded that Baltimore’s demonstrations are peaceful, it’s the police who are violent. McKesson then turned the tables on Blitzer, indicting both him and the society we live in by saying that “we care more about broken glass than broken spines.”
We need a moment of silence over those words to pause and think. We stand guilty of valuing property over people, so much so that it’s imbedded through our materialistic culture and our policies. Policies that deny basic rights such as access to drinking water for poorer residents in Detroit and Baltimore for non-payment of water bills.
We see it in the massive sell-off of ethnically diverse neighborhoods like the Mission District (largely Latino and working class) to property developers in San Francisco, who are looking to cash in on the cash-rich Millennial who can afford a $4 cup of coffee and a $4,000 studio. Development is also enfolding choice parts of Oakland, San Francisco’s neighbor to the east, “reclaiming” the largely African-American working class city for those who have more than enough money to live there. We are treating the poorer areas of our cities as the developing world.
Over the last fifty years, America’s poor and working class had nowhere to stay but in the cities where jobs were. Now these jobs have thinned — if not disappeared altogether — from factories and are slow to replace. Manufacturers have exported jobs overseas to increase the bottom line. With our amazing technological advances, fewer of us see an increased standard of living, while the rest of us here and around the world are under the wheel of progress. We know this already. Now we’re seeing the full price close to home.
Last week, in response to events in Baltimore, President Obama called upon the country to engage in soul searching:
If we really wanted to solve the problem we could. It would require everybody to say this is important, this is significant and that we just don’t pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, when a young man is shot or when his spine is snapped … investment is needed in the communities to bring economic opportunity, including resources for early childhood education and criminal justice reform that breaks the school-to-prison pipeline that is rendering young men in these communities unemployable … [We need] job training programs as well as school reforms. That’s hard. It takes a kind of political motivation we haven’t seen in quite some time.
What the president is talking about is political will to address the inequity. This column is not an answer to our urban crisis, but a call to deliberately reassess our own values as we observe this phase of our collective history. Where are we at? If we continue to focus on the looting, the fires, the stones thrown at police — the only thing the mainstream media wants us to know — we will miss the point and opportunity of this crisis, and will be looking at not only Baltimore, but other cities down the road.
Many of us have stood by as social inequities crystallized over time. And now these inequities give people no other recourse than to explode in anger: cars bursting into flame, shattering glass are the images we see on screen and print. How many more cities will need to erupt before we stop and examine our part in the play? How many airstrips in remote and beautiful places can hedge fund managers buy to escape the urban unrest of the ‘Fire Next Time’ in the chic urban area they call home?
What and who do we value most? How much money do we need before we can rid ourselves of that terrible nagging sense of social responsibility to the rest of the community and the world? It’s going to take more than a Kickstarter campaign to do it. The clock is ticking.
As of this writing, Maryland’s State Attorney Marilyn Mosby has brought murder charges against the six police officers implicated in Freddie Gray’s death. This provides a temporary Band-Aid and some hope to the people of Baltimore. But the road is longer ahead, because the national wound is much deeper: our collective loss of soul.
In the face of human suffering paid for by all this economic and technological advancement, we don’t seem to have the massive political will yet — like a vast anti-war movement prevalent in the 1960s — to change our present-day inequity. There are some glimpses of hope, especially amongst Millennials, that something has to change, and they are attempting to change it one community at a time. But until the rest of us do, the unrest that horrifies us with its terrible ‘property damage’ will not be over any time soon. We need to feel the horror from a deeper place. We knew this problem existed nearly fifty years ago. High time to change it for the better.
Yes, indeed, everyone’s got to pitch in and vote for politicians that aren’t just a veneer. There has to be subtlety and nuance in the political discourse. I have a friend who is about my age, who ran for metro council in his home district last year. He didn’t win, but he gave the old guard a run for their money, while keeping the other newcomers true. He’s a beautiful example, although missing the millennial era by maybe a year or two, of a push for change in political will. He understands, like many of my peers, that lip service and a glossy, but regressive or stagnant at best platform is not going to cut it anymore. We have to get our hands dirty, and work our asses off.
Michael:
Absolutely spot on. There is more than meets the eye in terms of candidate platforms. The sides are clearly delineated, and the stakes are even higher. And the frontrunner on the Dem side needs to channel her inner Elizabeth Warren without making the centrists batshit crazy. Maybe by the time November 2016 rolls around, the centrists will move left. But that is part of the hard work we must do–make the connection between the cause and effect on the streets, abroad and at home.
Is it too late to ditch the terms Left and Right when talking about politics and people? The distinction is a set up for Left to lose because of the ancient baggage that comes with most dichotomies in Indo-European languages. Right is correct, Left is sinister, and must be wrong because that’s what you are if you’re not Right. Same goes for Black and White. Rather than someone ‘move left’ I’d rather see them get real and show as much compassion as strength. Is that left and not right? Well, I suppose I’m arguing against a tide here cause we love our binaries. Hard to see past the binaries with thousands of years of swords and canon and firearms enforcing the hallucinations of the binary trap. How can an Eagle fly when its wings fight like this? Left and Right is a ruse to keep us fighting instead of uniting.
Yeti:
It would be an interesting paradigm shift to take apart the standard divides. Mix it up a bit to confuse people who play one off the other. Make candidates WORK for us. There needs to be walk with the talk. An idea to explore in future columns.
Here’s an interesting interactive link that analyzes the best and worst areas to raise poor families and rich families in any county in America.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-best-and-worst-places-to-grow-up-how-your-area-compares.html?abt=0002&abg=0
Mine (Alameda County) did not do too well.
Fe,
Great link to understand the best of what metrics can do. The social scientist in me was fascinated!
There is much to do and I truly believe understanding of what can be the more subtle issues , are very helpful.
Beautiful Fe, “a call to deliberately reassess our own values”.
Marilyn Mosby’s temporary Band-aid is one of those teeny baby-steps , like Pholus’ opening the wine bottle, that leads to the huge changes ahead. Saturn, aka, government, aka Marilyn, listened to Uranus, aka change, aka, rights of individuals, which was helped by Chiron, aka pain, aka recognition of inequality. which opened/opens our eyes to possibility.
One possibility that can be danced into being, like Quaoar (along with Pholus) on the Galactic Core, is “social responsibility to the rest of the community”, aka Venus in Gemini opposite Quaoar, aka today. Venus focused into consciousness (Sun) how this was the time to begin, back in 2012 when she occulted the Sun. Mercury was then where Venus is today, 27+ Gemini, a sign about multiplicity and communication and community and grade school.
Back then, in June 2012, on the day when Venus occulted the Sun, the Moon, aka The People, aka mankind, was just about to occult Pluto, aka transformation, aka breakdown, in Capricorn, aka laws, aka resistance. Moon and Pluto were square Uranus, aka lawless, aka change, aka rights of individuals, and when that moment in June 2012, as seen from Washington DC, happened, Uranus was in the 3rd house, aka communities, aka communication, aka grade school, aka just beginning.
As for Venus and the Sun on that day in June, 2012, they were in the 6th house, aka worker bees, aka health, and they were squared, aka challenged, by Mars, aka anger, aka action, in Virgo, aka working, aka healing, in the 9th house, aka the Big Picture, aka Understanding. Mars was at 16+ Virgo and the Sun/Venus was at 15+ Gemini on June 5, 2012.
This August, Jupiter will reach the sign of Virgo and at that time the Sun, aka consciousness, will be at 18+ Leo, trine where Uranus is today at 18+ Aries, aka connection between future and present. Before that happens, next month Jupiter will reach 18+ Leo (trine where Uranus was today and conjunct where Sun will be when Jupiter reached Virgo) and a few days later Jupiter will trine Uranus on the day after the Summer Solstice (a new chapter) on June 21.
Jupiter will go on to reach the degree hot spot where Mars was when squaring Venus-Sun back in June, 2012. That will happen November 1st, just as Mars and Venus conjunct the U.S. Sibly Neptune, which squares the U.S. Mars. Jupiter will translate for the 2012 Mars and Venus-Mars will translate for the U.S. Neptune-square-U.S. Mars on that day, November 1st, 2015, just as the north node at 0 Libra prepares to back into the sign of Virgo, aka healing, just as the New Moon in Scorpio prepares to transform.
Just like us, time is connected; past, present, future, but – just like us – the ability to be conscious of this connectivity has not fully developed. Except through astrology, and, possibly, the study of history are we able to see these connections. What we, here, reading Fe’s words, and everywhere else in the world, are thinking and feeling is connected to what will be happening this June and the June of 2012, and August 2015, and beyond. That is the “Big Effect” that comes from Pholus’ “Small Cause”. It’s the dream Quaoar holds today, opposite Venus who must balance, aka evaluate our grade-school values with that dream so as to make it happen.
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