Monday, August 9, 2010

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. 
 

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