Racism

Racism and Propaganda

 

This is a Neptunian tale of old delusions and evil intentions gone awry.   

 

Andrew Breitbart (Neptune trine Venus and Chiron, Sun in Aquarius opposite Moon, Sun trine Jupiter and Uranus) is a propagandist promoting rightwing causes.  He engineered the downfall of Acorn, a national organization devoted to helping the poor.  He scored this victory by publicizing a couple of provocateurs, costumed as a pimp and prostitute, visiting Acorn offices to ask workers there how they could get a mortgage and other financial resources. 

 

The firestorm resulting from mass media airing of those videos caused government funding to be withdrawn from Acorn—before it was revealed that Breitbart had created a lie.

 

Breitbart's most recent effort—an attempt to paint the NAACP as a racist organization—backfired.  Breitbart claims "someone" sent him a video of Shirley Sherrod, of the US Department of Agriculture, speaking at a small town NAACP meeting. Her father was murdered by a white racist. In a brief snippet of that speech, Ms. Sherrod described an incident in 1986 when she felt a jolt of prejudice against a white couple who were threatened with foreclosure. 

 

The point Sherrod was making is that she then had an epiphany and reversed herself, and helped the white couple save their farm.  She realized that poverty is the heart of the problem we call racism.  

 

By editing a snippet of the video in which Sherrod describes a momentary feeling of racial disdain, and publicizing this via TV news outlets, Breitbart managed to ignite another firestorm which resulted in Sherrod being fired from her job. 

 

Seems everyone was ready to go with the old "seeing is believing" delusion and bought Breitbart's crude lie—before Sherrod and others protested, and the truth leaked out. 

 

If you compare the Fox News account of Breitbart's public relations effort with the MSNBC account, you'll get a strong sense of the Neptunian-ruled confusion and conflict racism causes.  Which brings me to the point I want to make.

Racism is one form of xenophobia, defined as "an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange." (dictionary.com.)  It surprises most contemporary people to learn that there was less xenophobia and/or racism is Colonial America, and more "mixed marriages" per capita than there are today. Back then, people of different races labored together, which quickly dissolved whatever xenophobia they originally felt toward one another. 

 

What engendered the stigma against African Americans was that they were expensive property, and their mixed-race children were legally the property of their owners.  English indentured servants were freed after their indenture period was up. Indians were so "disobedient" and headstrong they were soon discarded as laborers.  Many mixed marriages were broken up when the non-black partner moved away—although others were kept alive by runaway slaves and indentured servants joining Indian tribes. 

 

"Ol' Massa" paid a lot of money for those African slaves whose labors made him rich, and created laws to keep them separate from whites and Indians.  

 

Today, "Ol' Massa" is reincarnate among the ruling elite, and the stigma against African Americans persists, kept alive after the Civil War by Jim Crow laws and customs, and despite the Supreme Court's reversal of a previous ruling declaring an African American to be one-fifth of a white man. 

 

The Sherrod scandal unfolded with Neptune conjunct Chiron and both opposite Mercury.  By Winter Solstice 2012, Neptune will still be conjunct Chiron with both in a T square to Mercury opposite Jupiter.  Neptunian taboos change slowly.   

Taboos

Taboos

From: Robert Gover, USA

 

Under the Saturn-Uranus-Jupiter-Pluto T square, the USA is rapidly approaching a time when we'll have to overturn some taboos or sacrifice ourselves on the altar of ignorance.   

This isn't the first time a society faced such a choice.  In a book titled "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" Jared Diamond tells the fascinating story of the Norse people who lived in Greenland hundreds of years ago. Their environment underwent changes that threatened their existence.  They had a taboo—much like our taboo against marijuana.  They refused to eat fish.  As the so-called "Little Ice Age" made their hitherto fertile green environment colder and colder, they had to flee or starve, for they would not violate their taboo. 

 We in the USA have developed an abundance of taboos that are threatening our existence.  Skipping our addiction to oil, here's a brief list:

1. A privatized central bank, The Fed.  If we would democratically create the stuff we use as money instead of having our Federal Government buy loans from the private bankers of the Fed and stick us with the ever-ballooning "national debt," there would soon be prosperity aplenty for everyone. 

 

2. Foreign Wars.  If our Federal Government would kick its addition to foreign wars and bring our soldiers home from Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens of other foreign outposts, we would reduce our tax burden tremendously. It would cost billions of dollars less to BUY Iraqi oil. 

 

3. Cheap Chinese consumer products.  If we would impose tariffs on Chinese and other goods made by cheap foreign labor, and instead make the things we need at home, we would upgrade our lives and prosper with high quality goods and services—as we did before we shipped all those millions of jobs overseas, trading our own wellbeing for trans-national corporate profits. 

 

4. Prohibiting marijuana.  Our national drug, booze, causes more traffic deaths and injuries, more domestic violence and more festering health problems than marijuana ever could.  If the government would get out of the business of prohibitions and, instead, tell us what's safe and what's harmful to our health, we'd be a lot healthier, happier and wealthier as a society. 

 

5. Socialized medical care.  We already have a diluted version of this for a minority in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.  Our taboo against sharing the benefits of mainstream and alternative medicines is not only stupid, it's downright insane.  Medical procedures and pharmaceuticals have surpassed traffic accidents as the leading cause of death and injury in the USA today—all because of the need to make dollar profits from illnesses.     

 

We Americans waste more money on bribing politicians (called campaign contributions) and behavioral controls (i.e., the prohibition against marijuana) than we spend on things that would improve our lives.  We have become like those ancient Norse Greenlanders who refused to eat fish, even though they were surrounded by endless banquets of fish, and thus consigned themselves to extinction. 

 

A young lawyer named Robert R. Arthur recently wrote a book titled "You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos."  Since no major publisher would touch it, he produced hand-made copies at his kitchen table.  One amazon.com reviewer said, "…if you pee, poop, fart, pick your nose, or masturbate, you will undoubtedly find value in this book."   

 

And if you're an astrologer who is interested in the presently unfolding changes promised by the long Uranus-Pluto square that will dominate this decade, you will derive a keener sense of the work this revolutionary pair faces—and the changes in store for us as a society.  If, that is, we have what it takes to kick our addiction to insane taboos.