I have no idea who said it first,
but I certainly agree that a nation is truly known by how it treats its young.
Well, in the wake of yesterday’s DC announcement that the so-called “Dream Act”
(aka “DACA”) would be rescinded and gradually shut down over the coming months,
unless Congress passes legislation to legalize the program—we now have a new
measure of our nation’s heart and soul.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s been
trying to play both sides against the middle on this one, so Attorney General
Jeff Sessions—a vehemently anti-immigration member of the Trump
administration—broke the news in an 11 a.m. press conference.
The general consensus in media
reports to this point is that Trump was “playing to his base” with this action,
but polls show that only 25%
of his base actually wanted him to do this. So, he’s playing to the most
fringe, hardliner elements of his base. He was also responding to legal
pressure from several states (including prominently, Texas) whose attorney
generals were threatening to sue the administration if he didn’t take this
action. The Dreamers who served as first responders during Harvey are now
officially thrown to the curb.
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Considering the “Dreamers” are
overwhelmingly positive members of their communities, doing all the right
things we would like to see from all our
young adults, means little to those who can only see life through a “Zero-Sum”
prism. Through this prism, every immigrant “outsider” in this country is a
potential obstacle to their success, their pocketbook and their cultural/moral/economic
superiority. Yes, there’s a racist element in all of it as well: killing the
DACA program has been a clear Alt-right/white supremacist priority.
If jobs are in short supply, it must
be an immigrant’s fault; if wages are stagnant, blame immigrant communities.
Never mind that this thinking lets D.C. and our particular brand of capitalism
off the hook! Deficits in jobs and wages have solutions that don’t involve
slapping shut our borders and deporting people, but these solutions involve an
uncomfortable shift of power back to workers and away from Wall Street. Not likely
to happen while we have convenient immigrant scapegoats.
To be clear, shutting down DACA and
disrupting the lives of some 800,000 “dreamers”—young adults who arrived here
as children from other countries and, through no fault of their own, have never
been legally documented—is far from a popular move across the country. Many
Republicans in Congress urged Trump not to take this move, but with a packed
legislative calendar this fall, not to mention the specter of war with No.
Korea, will they be likely to get around to passing a fair, humane set of
immigration reforms before the deadline today’s announcement laid down?
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A
very long story, coming back around
Astrologically, this issue resonates
in American history with the pre-Civil War days, specifically the period in
which the original Texians (now Texans) broke away from Mexico and declared
themselves to be an independent Republic on March
2, 1836. This action became complicated by other U.S. territorial ambitions
of the time and the U.S. annexation of Texas as a state in December 29, 1845. The tension all this produced finally erupted
into the Mexican-American war a few months later—on April 25, 1846—a war that left more than a few hard feelings that
may be coming back on some level to haunt us under the Trump administration.
Let’s take a brief look at these
charts before we go on, setting each of them next to the U.S. Sibly chart.
Biwheel
#1: (inner wheel) U.S. (Sibly)
chart, July 4, 1776, 5:10 p.m., LMT, Philadelphia, PA (outer wheel) Republic of Texas,
March 2, 1836, 12:00 LMT (no exact time known), Washington-on-the-Brazos,
Texas. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node.
Clearly, the dominant factors in
this biwheel are found in the lower hemisphere—especially in that packed 2nd-3rd
house area where Texas Uranus (Pisces) forms a mutual reception with Texas
Neptune (Aquarius), and where Texas Uranus-Mars-Mercury (Pisces-Aquarius) conjoin
the Sibly
Moon (Aquarius) and trine Sibly Mars (Gemini). The “dogs of
war” were unleashed (trines to Sibly Mars) here, in the name of adding
territory to the U.S.—even though Texas was not yet ready for statehood at this
point. Wars don’t just “happen” the moment they are declared—it takes years to
build up to them.
Between the time that Texas
announced its independence and the time it became a state in 1845, the U.S.
government approached Mexico with an offer to purchase additional territories,
but was rebuffed; this became one more incentive for war in April, 1846.
For the record, Uranus-Neptune mutual
receptions have been associated with war more recently, too—specifically, the
2003-2010 passage which marked the worst period for U.S. forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
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Texas Jupiter-Juno (Cancer) conjoin Sibly
Jupiter-Venus (Cancer). Clearly, there were financial and
resource-related “perks” associated with Texas breaking away from Mexico and
subsequently allying itself with the U.S.—as Juno seems to be saying
here, it was a “match made in heaven.” On an interesting note, this Jupiter
action is happening over the Sibly 7th house of ally relationships,
so the U.S.-Mexico relationship comes into play here.
What may seem like a more or less
friendly relationship in modern times has probably never been entirely free of
“baggage” and resentment—the Mexico independence chart from 1821 (Book of World Horoscopes Chart #215A)
features a 5°+Libra Sun,
which falls exactly square both these
Cancer Jupiters. If nothing else, Mexico was certainly on the losing
end of that statehood transaction in terms of resources (i.e., Texas oil,
etc.).
Interchart
T-Square: Texas Pluto-Venus (Aries)
conjoin Sibly Chiron (Aries) and oppose Sibly Saturn-Juno (Libra); this axis
squares Sibly Sun (Cancer). This continues the theme we’ve seen with
the Jupiters
above: great resources (Venus-Pluto)
were at stake and it was a first-come-first-served scramble, with six-guns
blazing. There were winners and losers (Chiron), but the scramble was soon
subsumed under the U.S. flag (Sibly Sun-Saturn), shored up by its legislative/military
might (Texas Venus sextiles Sibly Saturn). The young American
nation was bringing an almost volcanic transformation to the continent (Texas
Pluto squares Sibly Sun) in those times, and
indigenous peoples from sea-to-sea—including Mexicans—bore the brunt.
Biwheel
#2: (inner wheel) U.S. (Sibly)
chart, July 4, 1776, 5:10 p.m., LMT, Philadelphia, PA; (outer wheel) Texas Statehood,
December 29, 1845, 12:00 p.m. LMT (no exact time known), Washington, D.C.. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node.
The sensitive lower hemisphere is
still buzzing in this biwheel, with a lively focus on the Sibly Moon (the
People) by Texas Venus-Neptune (Aquarius). Those were the days of “Go West
Young Man,” with the California Gold Rush a mere 4 years away. They were heady
times for adventurous fortune-seekers (Venus) and ruthless land grabbers,
but Americans (Sibly Moon) were under the illusion (Neptune) that it was
their “Manifest
Destiny” to overtake all the land from sea-to-sea.
Whether or not to allow Texas to
become a slave state was a big controversy at the time. We can see the violent
opportunists who wanted slavery in Texas in the harsh Texas Mars-Uranus (Aries) that
squares Sibly Venus-Jupiter (Cancer) here—slavery was an economic issue
then that haunts us yet today, long after we’ve fought a war over it and it’s no
longer socially acceptable. Notice the
parallel between today’s Uranus transit through Aries
(2010-2018) and the one that spanned 1843-1850: economics-based aggression and
tension, with one race working to capitalize on the bodies of another.
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Today’s anti-immigration forces
think we will profit from expelling the Dreamers, however many economists
and business leaders dispute this impression. In fact, it becomes more clear all the time
that Trump and the anti-immigration movement are more concerned with
maintaining America’s white majority than they are with saving jobs or growing
the American economy.
It all amounts to a rather twisted
version of “identity politics”—something Republicans disdain when Democrats practice
it, but in this case, we’re talking about racial
identity. Unfortunately, the cardinal signs—especially
Aries and Cancer—are prone to toxic wrangling over identity and heritage.
In fact, we see the toxic force (and
economic stakes) of this wrangling very dramatically in an Interchart T-Square: Sibly Pluto (Capricorn) opposed Sibly
Mercury (Cancer), with this axis square to Texas Pluto-Sibly Chiron (Aries). Investors
enjoyed an unbelievable cornucopia of opportunities once the word got out
(Sibly Mercury-Pluto) that the roads going westward were figuratively
“paved with gold.”
The government encouraged this westward expansion by
deploying the U.S. military to clear indigenous peoples out of the way, as
needed. Indigenous Central Americans who happened to live on the U.S. side of
the Rio Grande were caught in the fray just as Native Americans were.
Biwheel
#3: (inner wheel) U.S. (Sibly)
chart, July 4, 1776, 5:10 p.m., LMT, Philadelphia, PA; (outer wheel) Mexican-American
War, April 25, 1846, 12:00 p.m. (no exact time known), Washington, D.C.. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node.
The energies we considered in Biwheels #1 and #2 seem to culminate in the outer wheel here, which marks the
outbreak of war between Mexico and the U.S., which was at that time embroiled
in “expansion fever.” Here we see Neptune conjunct Saturn in Aquarius,
conjunct Sibly Moon: whatever limits the American people may have
naturally honored were suspended during those times—they were driven by a
public relations campaign that painted the West as the “Land of Opportunity,” and there were serious
profiteering forces at work, as well.
All this is embodied in an Interchart
T-Square: Sibly Mercury (Cancer) opposite Sibly Pluto (Capricorn); this axis
squares War Mercury-Pluto-Ceres-Sibly Chiron (all Aries). Naturally,
this means the nation was experiencing its first Pluto-square-Pluto
transit, so the cardinal drive to transform the nation allowed major
corporations to emerge, and to gain a foothold in the resource-related
industries. As mentioned earlier, there was always an assumed air of cultural
superiority that accompanied the west-going adventurers: the indigenous were
easy to shunt aside and dispossess because they were non-Christian “savages.”
Pluto’s transit of Sibly
Chiron speaks to the heinous harm that was caused by this demagoguery;
it may also point to the origins of our national, karmic difficulty with race
relations. We’ve certainly seen a resurgence of these difficulties as Uranus
has transited over these same Aries points in the past few years.
Maybe that same demagoguery is in
play with Trump’s heartless decision to rescind DACA and play to his base? Or
with those state legislatures that decided to threaten law suits over the
program (basically because it was Obama’s
way of filling the void created by Congress’s inaction)? Or with Jeff
Sessions’ Justice Department? Etc…
The outbreak of hostilities with
Mexico is marked here with War Mars (Gemini) conjoining Sibly
Mars, forming the middle leg of a mutable Interchart T-Square: War
Venus-Pallas (Pisces) opposes Sibly Neptune (Virgo); this axis squares that
Mars-Mars conjunction. A mutable t-square reflects times of change and
chaotic stress, and in this case, it involved Mars style violence,
which was enabled by our Sibly Neptune’s illusions of
entitlement.
The vaguely imperialist sounding “Manifest Destiny” has
since been replaced by the “American Dream,” (hence the term “Dreamers”), but
in the 1840s as well as today, not just anyone
was entitled to that dream.
Gemini is disposed here by a
strident Aries Mercury, sextile Saturn-Neptune (Aquarius) near the
Sibly Moon, which suggests that the press was banging the drums of
war, preparing people for the collective effort and the inevitable ethical
“compromises” that go along with war. The Aquarius duo is disposed in turn by a
bellicose Aries Uranus. If some of this feels familiar, it’s because it is:
we’re dealing with a strong mix of cardinal and mutable energies and a
belligerent Uranus again today.
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Which
brings us to today…
When Jeff Sessions announced Trump’s
decision to end DACA, but to give Congress some time to craft a law that would
save the program in some form, he framed the decision as both a law-enforcement
matter and an economic matter: the former because, by definition, the Dreamers
are “illegals,” despite the fact that these young people had nothing to do with coming here as
children.
As the PBS News Hour cited
this evening (9/5/2017), 59% of them actually have a sibling who is an American
citizen. IMHO, Sessions had no legitimate justifications for splitting up
families, especially when the “illegal” person was brought here as a child.
The other frame Sessions applied is
the economic argument I alluded to earlier: that immigrants are taking jobs
away from citizens. PRI.org’s “The World” disavowed this idea with strong economic arguments: what
follows is a small excerpt:
“Scrapping the program would not only have devastating psychological effects on current DACA
recipients and their families, but the potential to negatively affect the
US economy, according to various studies.
‘We estimate that the cost [to] the government in terms of reduced
tax revenues would be $60 billion in the next decade,’ said Ike Brannon of the
CATO Institute, who co-published ‘The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Repealing DACA’ in
January. “The broader economic cost of shifting these kids into less productive
jobs would be about $280 billion in the next 10 years.’
Brannon’s estimates are conservative when compared to similar studies
about what ending the program could mean for the country.
According to research by the Center for American Progress, ending DACA
would result in a loss of more than $460 billion from the national gross
domestic product over a decade.”
Yet, the deluded zero-sum mentality
prevailed in this decision, and the biwheel for today’s event points to why.
We’ll also see some parallels with historical events we’ve been looking at—no surprise!
Biwheel
#4: (inner wheel) U.S. (Sibly)
chart, July 4, 1776, 5:10 p.m., LMT, Philadelphia, PA; (outer wheel) DACA end
announced, September 5, 2017, 11:00 a.m. DST, Washington, D.C.. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node.
Interchart
T-Square: DACA Sun (Virgo) opposes DACA
Neptune (Pisces); this axis squares Sibly Uranus-DSC (Gemini). What
better energies for a soft-spoken announcement that casually upends hundreds of
thousands of lives? Giving no evidence for his claims (that the Dreamers are
bad for the economy, that harassing these motivated young people will do anything to make the country more secure
or more law-abiding), Sessions’ announcement most likely reflected what’s in
his mind and in Trump’s mind—DACA Mercury disposes this Virgo Sun
from controlling, self-focused Leo—no facts required (Neptune opposes Sun).
DACA Mercury also opposes
Sibly Moon (Aquarius)—Sessions was directing his comments to the American
people, as though the Dreamers aren’t part of that people. In fact, they belong
nowhere else! The DACA Moon (Pisces)—which aptly represents the Dreamers here—conjoins
Sibly Ceres and opposes DACA Mars
(Virgo).
Here we see a sign of the hostility
directed at these young people, who are,
despite denials (Pisces/Neptune) to the contrary, being held potentially liable
for their parents’ actions. Ceres’ presence here suggests that the
dream of establishing the own households in American communities (Sibly 3rd)
is caught in the crossfire.
DACA Mars (Virgo)-Mercury (Leo) trines
DACA
Uranus (Aries), suggesting that there’s a rough road ahead for
Dreamers, unless their cause is championed in the same passionate terms that
the opposite viewpoint enjoys on Alt-right sites. Protests have already begun,
but these energies suggest that they are only getting started. It will be
interesting to see how law enforcement is directed (by Sessions and others) to
handle such events.
If the Pisces Moon here does signify
the Dreamers, we need to be alert to signs of victimization and scapegoating.
Unfortunately, there are early signs that racist fringe elements are feeling
empowered by today’s announcement.
Interchart
Kite: DACA Saturn (Sagittarius) forms
a
Grand Fire Trine with DACA Mercury-No. Node (Leo) and DACA
Uranus (Aries); DACA Jupiter (Libra) opposes DACA Uranus (Aries). This
type of unleashed fire, pierced through the heart by a strong cardinal
opposition has been with us for awhile,
with the Nodal axis transiting backwards through Leo-Aquarius. It was also a
strong feature of the great eclipse we experienced in August. These are simply
volatile times, and this chart suggests that whoever leverages the passion
afloat to their best advantage will carry the day.
Sagittarius has a forward-thrusting
“dream” quality to it: the question here is whether Saturn’s presence in the
sign will squash those dreams. Jupiter’s involvement here, sextile
to and disposing Saturn and sextile to the No. Node, opposite Uranus
and square DACA Pluto (Capricorn) suggests that making the strongest
business/economy-oriented argument will be the key to defending the DACA
program.
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Final thoughts
A word should be said about the information that those applying for the
DACA program have been required to turn over to the government on their
applications. The young applicants were basically asked to trust the government
to protect their interests when they turned over their vital information
(including Social Security numbers) for a chance to acquire legal work permits
and attend college—to basically “come out of the shadows” of illegality into
normal American life.
With the Mercury in Biwheel 4 tied into a fiery trine with
authoritative Saturn and belligerent Uranus, it’s quite possible this
trust will be abused, in the name of “law and order.” I am further concerned
about the inconjunct between Mercury and Chiron (Pisces)—these kids
are quite possibly being set up for victimization, and that should be
unacceptable.
Timing is everything in astrology,
of course—but taking this action on the heels of Hurricane Harvey and its
devastating effects on immigrant and non-immigrant families alike, signals that
the nation’s humane “better angels” are being muzzled by this administration. Grand
trines carry a fated, “inevitable” feeling because the energy is often
unstoppable, so again, using that fire for a positive, rather than negative
purpose will be key. Maybe it’s time to unleash those “better angels?”
In fact, that is happening, as we
speak: Javier Palomarez,
president and chief executive of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
and a member of Trump’s “National Diversity Coalition,” announced yesterday that
he will resign from that presidential advisory group immediately. Apparently,
the council never met, anyway (it was so important to Trump), so it will
probably fall apart like the other advisory councils did in the wake of Trump’s
response to Charlottesville. Palomarez explains his view of the actions that
prompted his resignation in a New York Times
op-ed:
“Reckless” is exactly the word to describe today’s decision
to end DACA — one so obviously at odds with the national interest. Under
DACA, 65,000 individuals were graduating from high school and 10,000 from
college each year. Those who were in, or eligible for, DACA were paying
roughly $2 billion each year in state and local taxes. And the cost to the
American taxpayer was minimal: The program had no uncompensated administrative
costs, nor were recipients eligible for welfare benefits or subsidies of any
kind under the Affordable Care Act. Deporting Dreamers, on the other hand, will
cost
the federal government $60 billion, along with an additional $280 billion
reduction in economic growth over the next decade….
Over the past month, many corporate leaders have fled the
councils and coalitions President Trump assembled at the beginning of his
administration. I am proud to join them. While I will never cease advocating
for policies that benefit America’s Hispanic-owned businesses, the moral costs
of associating with this White House are simply too high. There is no place for
a National Diversity Coalition in an administration that by its word and deed
does not value diversity at all.”
Coming full circle, we can again,
probably assume that whatever Sessions expressed in his announcement reflected
Trump’s thinking, despite his comments professing to “have love for the
Dreamers.” Zero-sum thinking is a limited, dark perspective that spreads
contagiously when given the chance, and Trump seems to know no other way of thinking. We can speculate
on what kind of damage was done to him as a child—his chart does suggest that there
may be grounds for empathy—but that doesn’t really matter now.
Trump began his presidential
campaign with a speech that maligned Mexicans, and yesterday’s decision was the
logical extension of that theme. If it was a difficult decision, as he claims, it wasn’t because it was
heartless. He’s mastered heartlessness.
Raye Robertson is a practicing astrologer, writer and former educator. A graduate of the Faculty of Astrological Studies (U.K.), Raye focuses on mundane, collective-oriented astrology, with a particular interest in current affairs, culture and media, the astrology of generations, and public concerns such as education and health. Several of her articles on these topics have been featured in The Mountain Astrologer and other publications over the years.
She is
also available to read individual charts—contact her at: robertsonraye@gmail.com.
© Raye Robertson 2017. All
rights reserved.
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