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March 4 | What to Do: Copy Edit! I HAVE a really nice collection of 'what to do' letters sitting in a folder that I am sure many people are eager to read, and I would like to ask a reader here to take over cleaning them up and getting them ready for publication. You would need to have some copy editing experience, know your thens from your thans, and be a bit obsessed about consistency. You need to know what I mean when I say em dashes and smart quotes (if you don't please volunteer for another job at Planet Waves! -- we do have a few). You need to know what I mean by HTML mail and Veranda 12. And you would need about three hours on your hands before Sunday morning East Coast time to go over them and get them to me in good form for posting (hence any time Saturday or overnight Saturday). One of my astrology colleagues in the great nation of Canada wrote to me today about the travesty of the destruction of the what is truly sacred ground for astrologers, the band of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Without disparaging the lives that have been lost and the families that have been destroyed, the Earth and the history of humanity are also being shattered. Most people do not think about this, but when we went to school, that area was called "the cradle of civilization" because that is where all our knowledge was either developed, or imported to from some other place and took the earliest known root on Earth: writing, agriculture, mathematics, astrology and therefore astronomy, and much else that we take for granted today. I wrote about this in the summer of 2003. It is in the subscriber archives somewhere. I contend that this is not an accident. I don't really believe that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney are space aliens who have come here to destroy the planet -- but that is my working metaphor. In other words, we are not in the midst normal events, but rather we are experiencing a hostile takeover of our resources and weapons systems and they are slowly being turned against, well, against everyone. And it's amazing how difficult it is for most people to distinguish the "normal operation of government" from having this huge federal machine turned into something that does nothing but wreak devastation. It's done a lot of wreaking devastation in the past, as anyone who knows the history of Central America or South America from the 1940s to present can tell you. But it used to do other things occasionally too. Think about it. Seriously. What does the federal government DO? We all pay taxes. Even poor starving artists who never signed a 1040-EZ in their whole entire life can't drink a cup of coffee or dial the phone without paying federal taxes in some form. Okay, where does it all go? What do you GET for your money? In Europe, everyone gets health insurance. I realize that in the UK it kind of sucks, but at least it's there and there is a kind of ultimate safety net, and if you're in the Bahamas and you get sick, as a royal subject, you are taken care of. If you're a woman and you become pregnant, in many European countries you can take care of your baby for three years and not have to worry about work. If you get injured, you really get to go to the hospital without them picking through your walled and looking for every possible source of money. Those are just the health benefits. In Paris, the homeless are not arrested. To the contrary, people come around and give out blankets. In every city I've visited or lived in, the public transport is excellent. In Brussels, the turnstiles are open all the time, nobody checks your ticket. Even in San Fran with its beloved BART system, you still need a car. And you pay for that car; you pay a toll every time you cross a bridge; you pay high taxes when you register; you pay fuel taxes. Is public transportation infrastructure being developed? You tell me. In the US, welfare is cut, social programs are cut, school budgets are cut, city development money is cut, financial aid is cut. What do you get for your rather hefty federal taxes in the United States? I'll tell you. You get HALLIBURTON. You get war. You get these weird camps. You get billions of dollars in contracts for Blackwater Security to try to hold its own against an insurgency somewhere you've never been and will never go. And hey you even get the privilege of Bush flying around in his own private 747! Don't you feel like you live in a great country? Look at that big airplane he gets! My colleague also complained that more astrology Web pages were not speaking up about the war, or on social issues that are connected to it. The only other one at the moment, she said, is that of Philip Sedgwick; and I can tell you that Jonathan Cainer gives me free reign in the Astrology Secrets Revealed column and has many times spoken out. Are there others? Please let me know and we'll pass the information on. What I said to her is: the reason they are not speaking up is probably: business. Saying depressing things to your readers is allegedly bad for sales. Or it's the news, so it's unspiritual. I have thought this through for a second, and have decided to trust my readers. And not only to trust them, but to trust that what I need to say, indeed what my conscience dictates I must say, your are at least willing to consider -- but I know from my email it's much more than that. I can't get around it, anyway, because the job of Planet Waves is to cover news and astrology in an integrated way that opens the door for the personal growth factor in all of it. We do have a big issue on our hands with both the humanist and spiritual aspects of what we are seeing having few clear voices. One of them, however, is a retired investigative reporter named Bill Moyers. Here is something he said recently in one of his talks. "As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. What can we do? Let's hear from our readers. Those who wish to help pull the copy together may write to me at francis@planetwaves.net. But you have to know about em dashes and smart quotes! Love, e | ||||||
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