I had this job at the local newspaper when I was a teenager when I would work early mornings on the weekends in the office often completely by myself for long stretches of time answering phones and dispatching delivery persons. The dock door, which was not visible from where I worked, had to remain wide open the entire time so the delivery people didn’t have to be inconvenienced by parking and walking a few more feet to come in through the front door. This meant that I would spend hours on the phone with no way to know who was coming in and out of the building.

There were few times when disgruntled subscribers would drive up to the office and come in through the dock door, come into my office and start yelling at me about their subscriptions or late newspapers. And that was often terrifying. I was a poor kid who was lucky to have a job that worked around my college schedule. I wasn’t going to be able to find something else that would allow me to go to school full time so I could get out of my hometown faster, and I wasn’t raised to think I should be treated well anyway, so I stayed for about a year until I left town. And I couldn’t feel sorry for them. I was working full time and going to school full time so not knowing what was on television for a day was pretty much my entire existence.

So there was me, 19 but looking about 14, having to talk down angry men and women who drove up to throw their weight around at the person with the least amount of power because of some relatively tiny, petty problem that seemed pretty big in their petty, boring lives. And they’d want to speak to the manager. They paid their $2 a week, so they were entitled to whatever it was they thought I owed them. And they wouldn’t believe me when I said no one else is here on Sunday morning, please leave, the office is closed, I know the dock door is open but that isn’t for you to walk in. And it’s actually not easy to hang up on constant phone calls in order to call the police, so you try to get the crazy person to stop wandering around the offices, because you’re also supposed to be answering the phone and the dispatch radio and it’s a terrible idea to follow a strange man into dark, quiet corners of an otherwise empty building, so you just hope he’s not doing something terrible on his search for the manager he insists you’re hiding from him.

My boss, the circulation director who did not work on Sunday, wouldn’t let me close the dock door because the delivery people didn’t like having to come through the front door. It was inconvenient for them because it took a little longer. It didn’t matter that I could see the front door, and they could prop it open if they needed to, and there was no security by the dock door — no CCTV, no alarm, no way for me to know who in the world in coming in and out of the building. He told me if I was scared, to call a supervisor (not the police) and try not to make people angry, even though I was just taking complaints about problems that happened beyond my knowledge or control.

But you know what? He didn’t stay in that role for very long after that talk.

He got a job as a circulation director at a bigger newspaper in a bigger city.

But just for a little while.

Then he came to town to become the circulation director of our small newspaper again.

But just for a little while.

Nowadays, he drives a forklift, a job he’s apparently held longer than his jobs as circulation director combined.

I’m assuming he appreciates an open dock door more than ever.

This storming of the Capitol reminded me of that job today. The entitlement. The disregard for law or boundaries. The crudeness. The bullying. They pay their taxes. They’re the People in We the People. And the schlubs in the picture above could have been any one of these people who snuck up on me as I tried to talk them down and convince them to leave without hurting me or stealing something while I tried to hang up on the constant calls coming in so I could make an outbound one to a supervisor — not the police — because I couldn’t just lose this job, and in a town like Auburn, unless you know someone who can install you at a job, you’re fucked. You can be replaced with someone else willing to take very low pay, no benefits, bad work environments, terrible hours, and incompetent superiors…and willing to be more of a team player, which I have found over the years isn’t just a thing you say because you’re supposed to in order to demonstrate that you know the code, but that you are a team player, which isn’t actually working as a team so much as it’s a euphemism for doing whatever anyone wants you to do without complaining, which is basically like asking me to breathe underwater. But anyway, regardless of whether I’m a shitty employee and regardless of whether Congress is a bunch of shitty employees trying to maintain a shitty job as well, a bunch of maniacs can feel that somehow they’re the endangered and wronged party, but it doesn’t give them license to harm the innocent.

But yet we don’t fucking TELL them.

We tell them bullshit like the customer is always right without telling them that it doesn’t literally mean that, that it’s just the code of the job, or I pay your salary, which is not true for just about any publication because advertising, not subscriptions, pay the salaries. Subscriptions pay the cost of distribution. But even still, even if the customer is right, and even if the customer does pay the salary, the customer has not bought themselves a slave, and yet this is how American culture works, and this is why we have a bunch of MAGA shit stains storming the Capitol AND the fucking government basically letting them do it.

This is Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius, too.

Okay, so surprised? You shouldn’t be.

There’s a reason why I don’t entertain any Aquarian Age talk on this blog, and the reason is happening right now in Washington, D.C. as traitors storm the Capitol building to stall the turnover of power that was the result of a fair and lawful election.

But of course, they don’t see it that way. All these people – mostly white men – who have opted for anarchy or perhaps more accurately, apartheid, do not see themselves as regressive and oppressive. And even though Trump was forced to take down some of his inflammatory Tweets, what he is doing is not Constitutionally protected, because he knew damned well this shit was going to happen, and he wanted it, and if he is not charged for inciting a riot that caused at least one death, then this will happen over and over again.

But that’s Aquarius for you. It’s the “dark side” of Aquarius, although Aquarius as an archetype (not sun sign. I’m an astrologer, not a meme-maker. Give me some credit) does not have a light and dark side so much as it has sides, sides upon which others looking from the outside can describe as they wish based on their own feelings.

I believe I mentioned previously that there’s the question of who will count as our people and whose need from freedumb will result in the loss of other’s freedom when Jupiter and Saturn come into Aquarius. I have been concerned that where Jupiter expands and Saturn contracts, something is going to shatter, and one thing might expand, and another thing might contract.

But I was optimistic. In fact, I am still optimistic in the long run because it’s a fair election and unless Trump is going to rise a literal army (or use one borrowed from Putin, who has probably ejaculated at least once to the news today) and Congress refuses to go to war with it (because the president can deploy troops, but Congress declares war).

But what I think will happen is that this expansion of experimenting with power (Jupiter in Aquarius) has come to a head, and either Congress will now have to reduce the power of the president to avoid electing another terrorist leader like Trump (Saturn in Aquarius), or watch this institution crumble (Saturn) into nothing.

And we can’t ignore the fact that if these weren’t white, male traitors but rather BLM, the National Guard would have been deployed and this would have ended quickly because they would all be in prison or dead. The fact that these traitors were essentially allowed to storm a federal building because of their belief in a conspiracy theory tells you who counts and who doesn’t…doesn’t it?

And yes — they were ALLOWED to do this. This was essentially government sanctioned.

This behavior is Aquarius too. This is a group of people from the hegemonic class enjoying all their privilege (because they’re mostly still alive) as they screwed it up in their minds that they’re the ones being oppressed and marginalized because their malformed demi-god lost an election because of fraud even though when you piece together all the parts of their confusing and conflicting rhetoric, one of the paths could still reasonably lead to having lost a fair election.

They are the underdogs. But they are the silent majority silent no longer. They are the real victims of racism. They are the real victims of sexism. But they are proud of the fact that their culture, gender, religion, sexual orientation or whatever is “natural” or “superior” and they should be allowed to take pride in what they perceive as a hard-won victory over the entire world because Europeans and their descendants naturally rose to the top and all of their institutions exist in every other culture and country today. They are the victims of government. But they are the victims of not enough government. They are the hardworking who earned their wealth all by themselves with their bare hands, starting out naked and alone in the wilderness, using only their brains and grit to survive to rise to the top, and no one can take it from them. But also, they are poor because other people who are poorer take things from them even though they can’t quite tell you exactly how much of their tax dollars go where, other than it somehow, magically, never goes to them, even if they use the same social programs, infrastructure, government agencies, resources, and necessities regulated by the government so that they’re safe from drinking sewage or being thrown in prison forever without due process. They are the good Christians who are just naturally righteous against all sin. But also, it’s the Left’s job to act like Christ and be the so-called tolerant, loving, patient, and open-minded. They “suffered” under Obama though they can’t actually tell you what supposedly happened to them. But also, the fact that others are suffering now doesn’t seem to move these fantastic Christians to act.

So, if we are to follow this logic, then it would make sense that the rest of the country would gang up on this poor, beleaguered and martyring minority and vote for Biden so that they would have to “suffer” a Biden presidency, because everything is about them, and no one who is not them can have their own interests that have nothing to do with them. For example, in this paradigm, no black person actually wants to avoid being shot dead by cops during a bogus traffic stop; in this reality, black people only exist theoretically and only in relation to the needs of white people, so here, what they actually want is no police force in order to create anarchy so they can harm white people with impunity. And of course, that makes no fucking sense at all, but it only makes no sense if you live in the same reality I do, the one that I write from.

And this is why I don’t care much for Aquarian Age or a lot of the New Age about a vague better future when all of humanity is elevated above being human talk because I don’t think all of humanity is going to get on board, or that enlightenment is the same thing everyone thinks it is. The reason for that is that so far, there really hasn’t been anything to truly equalize us.

And I know most astrologers don’t agree with me, and I don’t care. A thousand other people can tell you that there is no spoon and be very clever about it, but I don’t think that’s going to help you when you’re just trying to eat your breakfast, and I’m on Earth to help you eat your breakfast, not necessarily to help you become a beautiful being of light. If that’s on your agenda, wonderful, but I happen to believe that it’s awful hard to become a beautiful being of light when you’re hangry, so here I am, handing out spoons.

And I we’re hangry for an equalizing experience.

We’ve had a lot of promise with pandemics, world wars, and climate change that is destroying our habitats and the habitats of the organisms we rely on, but nothing has wiped the slate clean and has brought humanity back to being naked and alone in the wilderness, using only their brains and their grit to survive and rise to the top again.

No asteroid destroying everything. No alien overlords who only see us as pests or commodities. No diseases that swiftly and mercilessly wipe out most of the population so quickly that we can’t find a cure or a vaccine in time. No neutron bombs.

The only things that equalize us destroys us…and that’s not Aquarius.

It’s Pisces.

Pisces is the real equalizer sign. Not Aquarius.

We thought the Internet would equalize us. It would give everyone a forum. It would make information available to everyone, and it would elevate all of us. It would create a pluralism that could have never existed before.

And it sort of happened.

On one hand, without being able to see and hear from people who are different, we would have many of the same prejudices (or they’d still be socially acceptable). We also would not discover things about ourselves or embark on many of our journeys of self-discovery without knowing that it’s even a possibility.

For example: gender identity, a very Aquarian-ish sort of thing, but not new by any means. And there are more people who go on gender journeys than there are people being honest about them, because even if you arrive at being cis-gendered and heterosexual, the journey informed you of exactly what kind of cis-gendered heterosexual you are, and thus the journey has become integral to your gender identity. And we can talk about this thing now, at least on the Internet, this gender fluidity that shows up everywhere that humanity has been before gender polarity was imposed on everyone and then despite it.

Of course, there are people who think this is a terrible, terrible thing, confusing biological sex and gender, claiming that others are creating confusion where none need exist, as if you’d just change something as intimate, political, and integral as your gender on a whim.

On the other hand, the Internet took a burgeoning anti-intellectualism and catapulted it into space where it is still speeding through the universe forever. Case in point: people who still think vaccines cause autism. The Internet has been a direct blood transfusion impotent parts of the population everywhere, including those who need a salacious and frightening boogeyman to make sense of things, to both bring forth and chase away all the invisible spirits that are somehow complicit in the very downfall of the believer, like a sort of weird digital shamanism. If you aren’t already looking for a boogeyman, the qanon conspiracy will inevitably come off as stupid and insane because it is – after all, what’s worse that Satanists AND pedophiles, but Satanic pedophiles who have a mysterious power over you and all the things you don’t understand. Otherwise, it would just be one crackpot on ham radio, one weirdo writing and printing zines, one episode of the Jerry Springer Show and little else.

And utopia may be Aquarian, but I’m wary of that too, because there’s just not enough of us yet who agree on what utopia is to actually make that a thing.

While I think it’s possible for people to have the Star Trek utopia we dream of, it’s only possible if we’re ALL dreaming of it, because there’s a lot of people who really, really don’t want the future that liberals want. I mean, there’s a lot of people who think a theocracy is paradise, and they’re looking to impose that on the rest of us regardless of how we feel about it because in what is so very utterly Aquarian, they know better than we do what is good for us. They want Jesus to come back and make us all believers or corpses, one or the other. And while I generally like Jesus and other historical and mythical figures, I think anyone else who has ever had religion weaponized against them, used as a tool of oppression against them, or has had it used to justify abuse or exploitation inflicted on them and/or used to insulate the perp, reserves the right to be wary of it the same way you’d condone a mass shooting victim disliking guns afterward.

If you could just imagine for a moment the NRA sending missionaries out to the various hospitals to visit the victims of mass shootings to help them heal, ostensibly, by trying to show them that the one thing that will help them the most is to start to love guns and learn all about them so they can eventually go around showing it by shooting other people, these missionaries would never leave the hospitals alive because someone, anyone, would beat them to death. And yet we either insist that those who have been hurt by religion come to see the good in it and assimilate into religion, or that they succumb to the pressure to be cool and indifferent to it like the white guys on YouTube who are lucky enough to only come to atheism through reason and not pain.

And there are people who think global warming is a myth and that those who believe in it are terribly mislead by an invisible occult hand who may as well be a god. There are those whose idea of utopia is the extinction of the entire human race. There are those whose idea of utopia is one only occupied by themselves and their books and pens and cats. There are many people in my country who think that there are shadow governments actively thwarting humanity’s attempts at utopia, as if we have any real indication that all humans would just become real chill and not totally Lord of the Flies on each other without an overlord.

We aren’t the same like that. We have managed to create a world in which many of us don’t have to live like that, so we don’t think about what is good for everyone in terms of what everyone else thinks is good for them.

We won’t go up together if we’re not down together.

If you want something that takes everyone down, look at Pisces.

Pisces is at the end of the zodiac, the last sign of the natural year before the sun returns in spring. It corresponds to the 12th house of endings, self-undoing, and collective oneness, and is ruled by Neptune, the planet of dissolution, elevation (levitation), confusion, fantasy, and the discarnate. It’s traditionally ruled by Jupiter, the planet of expansion.

Pisces brings things that we don’t see until it’s obvious and inescapable. It’s a slow-rising tide that swallows up the shoreline until it’s flooding your farm and your home ever so slowly until the entire island has disappeared. It’s diseases of mysterious origin. It’s pollution that cannot be contained. It’s drug addiction. It’s collective anxiety. It’s cults where you will drink the Kool-Aid and die in the middle of the jungle. It’s parasites that live undetected deep in your body, completely undetected until they die and release a toxin into the body. It’s dementia and insanity. It’s carbon monoxide leaking into your home while you sleep. It’s blight that causes famine, it’s the death of a creature we considered to be a pest that turned out to be an indispensable part of our ecosystem. It is NOT nuclear war — that’s Aquarius (and nuclear power and nuclear energy being ruled by Pluto as well) — but it is nuclear fallout. Pisces destruction can’t be avoided, and it doesn’t care who you are or where you come from. Opiate addiction will take down the rich and poor, the well-educated and uneducated. You can horde as many respirators as you can afford and have your home sealed as tightly as possible, but if all the air is poison, it will eventually kill you, too. And when there is no food, money means nothing, and when there is no water, loyalty means nothing.

So no — this doesn’t mean I’m excited for Jupiter to enter Pisces, or Saturn, for that matter, but I think we’ll be closer to finding what we’re trying to get, which is a return to oneness, even if that means giving up some part of your individuality. And that will be very hard for Americans who have many different clashing categories for themselves, many of which don’t have to clash except by the wish of the categorized. The easiest way to do that is to lose something big that we identify with, that we desire deeply.

Like freedom. Like wealth. Like social class. Like status. Like fame. Like adoration. All that cool Jupiter and Saturn stuff we like so much.

Like the ability to believe that you can have anything you want because if you work hard enough according to your own measure, you deserve it and if you don’t have it, it’s because someone stole it from you. Frankly, I think this would be the one that if all Americans lost, we’d finally see each other.

So…Jupiter was in Aquarius 12 years ago during the Great Recession that started when Jupiter entered Capricorn in December of 2007. This Recession lasted until Jupiter entered Aries in June of 2009, but people didn’t quite recover for a few more years, if they did. My chart was quite activated back them, with Uranus transiting my ascendant and Saturn returning, so those years completely changed my life. This time around? I’m not sure, because Neptune is transiting my ascendant, but nothing else too crazy – South Node transiting natal Neptune and the midheaven? I think I’m going to come out the other side not realizing what had just happened.

But what I don’t think is going to happen is some sort of mini-“Aquarian” age: I think this time is setting us up for the expansive oneness of Jupiter in Pisces in a years and the eventually contraction of eternity and making big dreams into material reality when Saturn enters Pisces in 2023, but only if we all want the same things. Back when Saturn was in Pisces, we had the first World Trade Center bombing, but we also had the beginning of the European Union. We had the rise of the supermodels, but also the rise of grunge music: supermodels, elite and tall (Saturn) and glamorous in an exclusive way (Saturn in Pisces), and also the utterly accessible (Pisces) stripped down (Saturn) music (Pisces) without pretense (Saturn), focused on the state of the soul and of being (Pisces) rather than girls and parties and being a badass (Aries). And I know the election of Bill Clinton rose the sleeping dragon in all of America’s working-class conservatives and their heroes like Rush Limbaugh (Saturn in Pisces). If this is around the time we can say that all that MAGA shit started, maybe, just maybe, when Saturn comes back to Pisces, it will dissolve once again, for whatever reason, and we can get all get back to the business of invading other countries for oil democracy.  

That’s 2023.