Taking off our masks

In June of 2020, when the Coronavirus became an obvious reality and residents in New York city stuck their heads out windows to cheer for the health care workers on their way to hospitals, the Lunar nodal axis was just moving into Gemini at the North Node. Many astrologers spoke about Gemini and the act of breathing and getting enough oxygen into their lungs. The wearing of masks became a symbol, and not just a way of keeping deadly germs from entering our lungs, or having too much pollution in the first place, especially in China.

China is just an example in a world which is overtaxed with the effort to feed masses of people, a world where there is an extreme imbalance in the levels of wealth and comfort. Fresh air is only one of the commodities at risk, as is also the metaphorical equivalent of air, which is free speech and the ability to say what is really on our mind. We seem to have an abundance of free speech in the United States in comparison to so many other countries in this world, and yet, we wear masks when it comes to our thoughts. We hide our thoughts, we filter our thoughts, and we tailor them for our social class, to fit with our acceptance into our own neighborhoods.

It is as young Alexis de Tocqueville wrote while visiting America in the 1830s after the American Revolution. Democracy had been achieved he said, but it hinged upon the rule of the majority, and, as he travelled about and spoke with many commoners in their own homes, he discovered that this hard-won freedom did not look like freedom at all. It looked like conformity to him. Thoughts were not hammered out by critical minds and hard-pressed hearts, but by local influences and broad-sweeping idealistic truisms shunted down to your immediate friends who would support you. And what if the majority became tyrannical?

Today, after waiting a year to receive a vaccine that has been in clinical trials proven to prevent the contraction of the Coronavirus, or at least to curtail the worst side effects of it, people are now conditioned to still keep their masks on inside a grocery store. Everyone who wanted a vaccine is now able to get one. And yet, many store fronts still keep the sign on the door that a mask is required. I suppose no one will actually be confronted, but the fact is that millions of people continue wearing masks in this country. Do we, as Alexis de Tocqueville said two hundred years ago, depend on our neighbors to know what to do next? Do we wait for the CDC to tell us, and then still wait for the governor of our own state to tell us, and then still wait for each storefront to take down the sign, before we figure out if it will be ok or not?

Am I just writing about face-masks? No. I am writing about masking our critical thinking, and having or not having the freedom to figure things out for ourselves. Yesterday in the news I read that Senator Marco Rubio from Florida spoke out in a plea to the United States government to open up all reports on UFOs and speak plainly to the citizens of this country about what the government knows. Good for him! On the same day, a news report appeared stating that a film clip of a UFO was “leaked” by the Navy (once again, right?). Was it a gesture to make Senator Rubio’s plea look silly, or to give him credence? Who knows? People shrug. They move on.

Yesterday the Gemini Lunar node (the public mind-set) was conjunct with Venus at 10 degrees Gemini. People love to think about UFOs – for a little while. Like the Gemini nature itself, most of us want to move on quickly to other things. But the point is, as Marco Rubio pointed out, we have a right to that information. Rubio has a Gemini Sun. In fact, it is pretty close to the eclipse that will occur on the 26th of this month (Happy Birthday, Marco!).

We keep our masks on so that we will fit in with others. Other countries in the world do that too, and in some countries it is dangerous not to do so, and I'm not talking about the Coronavirus. What excuse do we have in the United States for this attitude? We are supposed to be free here. Even so, we don’t like to say anything or do anything that is too different from the norm. If we tell people we saw a UFO or we had an out-of-body experience or that we are an astrologer, or anything else that is not within the majority of experiences, we shock people or we are shunned in some way. That is the norm. French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville was right in 1830, and he is still right today.

That is why I believe that the Gemini horoscope for the United States set at 2:17am to specifically put the planet Uranus on the Ascendant is not correct. We Americans would love to pretend we are that independent, even individualistic; but we are not. The Sibley chart and even the Scorpio chart both suggest the truer picture of us as a country. In the Sibley chart the Ascendant (the people) is ruled by Jupiter. And Jupiter is right next to Venus in Cancer in the seventh house, for all the world to see us. Venus rules the Midheaven, our contribution, our reputation as people who love family, who honor family and mom and the apple pie and the perfect picture of togetherness. The Scorpio chart might be even truer, and suggests a hidden quality to our real thoughts, with Pluto opposing Mercury, and Mercury ruling the 8th house of secrets; but on top of that, the Lunar nodal axis is with the Midheaven and IC, suggesting the outward dedication to family again, a responsibility to the group, and being a show-off about it, too (North Lunar node in Leo). With all our display of patriotism on the fourth of July most of us do have our own hidden thoughts about what we think of this country, underneath the idealism and the outer display.

I want to love the United States. It is the country of my birth, and in spite of all its faults, I want it to succeed and be that country that leads us into a better tomorrow, one which includes the acknowledgement of real UFOs, and the acknowledgement of overpopulation, and the acknowledgement of racism and of corruption, and the acknowledgement of complex environmental problems. I want masks off so that we can stop blaming the other side for our problems, whatever that might be.

To do that requires more than throwing money at it. We need a leader with inspiration. We need structure that works at organizing conversations between opposing parties, otherwise we are like children in a despotic classroom where teachers give favor to those who wear the right masks and profess the right things. Until we take off these masks of conformity, whatever they are, the clock will keep ticking toward a destruction of all that we supposedly profess to hold sacred.