At 9:39 a.m. eastern U.S. time, Monday, February 8, we leave the Sheep and enter the Year of the Monkey, a shift that will shake mass consciousness to the core.
The most striking quality of the U.S. presidential race is how straight-faced the policies of hate and fear are being delivered. Former policies of hate have rarely been delivered so shamelessly, as if insulting the intelligence of millions of viewers. Super-pac candidates might as well take one further step and simply announce that everyone below the millionaire line is being rendered the status of non-person, and everyone above can seize this wonderful opportunity to be gifted with even further perks to complete the division of America into the super-rich and their lackeys.
1968 was a Monkey Year that rocked the world unlike any other, even during a decade that rocked the world. Four main factors enabled that earlier Monkey to shake the crap out of a stuck world culture:
1. a new civil rights movement
2. a young generation that felt so alienated that it rejected all forms of authority
3. a war that was so universally hated around the world that it united all rebels seeking a cause and
4. television first coming of age with enough technology to create same-day broadcasts worldwide, but not yet enough corporate control to distill the messages into the predigested pablum of the current time.
(I'm indebted to Mark Kurlansky's book 1968 for these four insights.)
Only two of these factors are similar as we enter the current Year of the Monkey: Once again we have a civil rights movement, in the form of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. And we have a younger generation waking up to the absurdity of their leaders. However, the wars of our time lack the universal condemnation of the Viet Nam War, and TV has become so co-opted by corporate interests there's very little chance for dissenting ideas to be heard.
But 2016 has something 1968 lacked -- a worldwide web that links the globe in instantaneous communication. That, and the proliferation of cell phone cameras, is exposing the injustices of our system and keeping repression in check. The new Year of the Monkey may surprise the world with its surging force to bring sanity to the strange masquerade of our time where the rich get richer and the poor get the shaft.
And, as a Vermonter, I have to say GO, BERNIE!
To anyone who thinks his ideas impractical, or that he lacks the ability to move them through the system, I have an anecdote: In 1984 when he was elected mayor of Burlington the city was run by aldermen who felt the wrong guy had been elected, and they blocked all his improvements, until he took it back to the streets, woke up the people, and got each of them removed from office one by one, then went ahead and passed all of his reforms. I haven't been this passionate about a candidate since Bobby Kennedy.
And Bobby went through a spiritual conversion in the Year of the Monkey, where he went from being a spoiled millionaire son of a bootlegger, to a man whose face looked stricken when he emerged from poverty shacks down south. He didn't know or ask for TV cameras to be there, but as they closed in on him he vowed to make the necessary changes to fix this vast injustice, that in a powerful country like ours, millionaires profit while millions of people starve. No one who saw that look on his face doubted that he meant what he said. And the inequity he was appalled at has worsened by far until today we have one out of every four U.S. children on food stamps -- that's 25% of the country living below the poverty level!
A Monkey Year is the time hidden forces rumbling below the surface of the jungle erupt, offering a rare chance to make great change. A society does not change by telling it to change. A society does not change by showing it how to change. A society changes when the need for radical change that has been long sleeping in the collective reaches
critical mass, and a spokesperson comes along on the rising curl of the coming wave. Suddenly that individual takes on archetypal resonance, becoming
the avatar of a huge collective force whose time has come. As such sweeping forces come together you're in for the ride of your life in the Year of the Monkey.
