Taurus 11° (corresponding to April 30, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

It would seem that every person I pass on the street is more qualified than Trump. Why are the so few who run for the highest office in the land so wrong for it compared to, well, just about anybody. How did this happen. Is it really just money? Or is it related to sanity. Especially on the Republican side. Is having a screw loose a prerequisite for candidacy? Or, okay, people that are already in politics. Why isn’t Al Franken the next president. I mean we got lucky with Obama but I still think he’s a certain kind of crazy in that, if he didn’t have an outsized ego, he wouldn’t have grabbed for that brass ring. He is the unruffled king (Leo) far more than the teflon Bill Clinton (Leo) was. Obama, it seems, plans to pride himself on having lasted all eight years with out going ballistic over anything. Trump can’t last eight seconds without doing so. Surely there is something in between. Obama’s stealthy and above-censure moves, after all, have seen him quietly launch over 500 drone strikes. I’m not arguing the validity of having done so; but it is very much in keeping with his persona, characterized as it is, by having a cool remove.

Drone strikes, as opposed to conventional military strikes involving people in pilot seats or behind tanks or on the ground, are arguablly less humane because the human conscience isn’t that directly involved. Nowadays we train thousands more remote drone pilots than actual ones. If we’re not seeing the collateral damage and the thousands of innocent people, women and children included, being killed, it doesn’t emotionally register, we don’t feel it. And if we are emotionally responsible for the killings than we are that much more densitized not only to war but to human life in general. Surely that will seap further into mass consciousness. Drone pilots, in effect, are not very different from children playing video games, only what they see on the screen isn’t the be all end all, it is an abstract of a grim reality. We detach, we detach and yet, what? We want more attention. We want the greatest number of hits and clicks and followers in an on-screen world that is a representation of our lives, not the one we’re actually living. This two-dimensional reality is more than just concept fodder for science fiction novels, we are becoming less dimensional, not more so, as human beings.

We act differently in the two-dimensional world. We are more black or white. We make blanket statements that inspire pointed reactions. We get into online battles with people over politics or social concerns. We say more than we should, perhaps, behind the safety of our black and white screens. If we later were to bump into the individual we met earlier on the laptop battlefield, we might hem and haw, retract and reposition, because there is more nuance to human interaction in the flesh. There is chemical reaction that might inspire more empathy or other forms of kindred spiritedness that might prevent you from attacking or blocking as you do electronically. Even though, a generation ago, the notion was floated that”we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” we have done the opposite. We are creating a wilderness of wires and fibers and satellites and other muscle and sinew of isolation. And yet, what do we most want from this virtual non-dimensional world—every possible shred of fandom we can amass; and why is that? Money. We want more money. We want all the money. It isn’t enough to have the accolades alone unless they monetize. And that is all fear. Fear, fear, fear.

Not to say I blame you for being afraid. It’s what is expected of you. It’s what makes you malleable. It’s what militarizes you. But you should be most afraid of what you’re putting in place to protect you. And get off the fucking computer.

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