https://newsletter.freewillastrology.com/p/the-burning-time
The Burning Time
Rob #Brezsny
..."For decades, we avoided the difficult reckonings: the conversations about white supremacy that needed to happen after the civil rights movement, the economic inequality that kept growing unchecked, the civic institutions that needed reimagining, and all the truths about our genocidal and colonialist history that needed to be faced and integrated.
We suppressed the small fires. We chose comfort over confrontation, incremental reform over transformation, and politeness over justice. We let the undergrowth accumulate, including the resentments, the unaddressed grievances, and all the broken systems we kept patching instead of rebuilding.
And now the fire has come. The Trumpocalypse isn’t just one man or one administration. It’s the accumulated fuel of everything we refused to burn away when the fires were smaller and more manageable. It’s what happens when a society postpones its reckonings until they become unavoidable.
...
To any thinking and caring person, the current landscape looks apocalyptic. We can reasonably conclude that our republic is being destroyed. And no other event better symbolizes the cluster-fuck of hideous atrocities than the barbaric, execution-style murder of Renee Nicole Good, mother of three, by a masked thug hired by ICE.
...
What if the current American catastrophe is also cracking open what was sealed shut in our collective consciousness? What if the seeds of a genuinely multiracial democracy, an actually equitable economy, and a truly inclusive society were already here, locked tight, and this fire is what finally releases them?
The version of America that carried those sealed seeds is dying. The parent tree doesn’t get to survive its own regeneration. These are all burning: the country we thought we were, the stories we told ourselves about our exceptionalism and inevitable progress, and the comfortable illusions about how democracy works. Major parts of our national identity are dying, turning to ash.
The fire hurts! America is undeniably burning. Real people are fleeing. Immigrants are terrorized. Trans people are under assault. Women’s bodily autonomy has been stripped away. The most vulnerable are bearing the worst of the decimation and devastation.
But here’s what the lodgepole pines know: The fire burns away what was choking out new growth.
...
Sometimes terrible things happen because hideous bullies ans thugs seize power and cause immense harm. The Trumpocalypse is real. The cruelty is real. The evil is real.
But it’s also true that human societies, like lodgepole forests, sometimes have a mysterious capacity to metabolize catastrophe into fertility. We wouldn’t be the first to take the ash of what burned and grow new life from it. Not because the fire is good, but because we are built to regenerate both individually and collectively.
The question isn’t whether we will face this fire. We are facing it. The question is: Will we let it and help it it do its work? Will we allow what needs to burn to burn—the systems that were never going to save us, the stories that were never true, and the institutions that served power instead of people?"...
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