It’s happening now. And it’s irreversible. It was promised to us in the 1960s as the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” – a world where harmony, understanding, peace and trust would abound.
The Mayans reiterated the promise in 2012, when they predicted that the perfect alignment of the sun, the earth, and the center of the Milky Way (for the first time in 26,000 years) would inaugurate the “sixth era of the sun.” It would bring to humanity and the Earth itself a positive physical and spiritual transformation.
It’s happening now before our eyes.
And the agent of this profound change? Its polar opposite! A Trumpty Dumpty sitting on a “great and beautiful” wall symbolic of resistance to everything promised to us by Mayan wisdom.
Yet, Trumpty prepared us for the “great fall” of the entire world that his wall of separation symbolized – a white supremacist patriarchy that now lies in pieces impossible to reassemble despite the best efforts of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
Trumpty came, remember, specifically calling into question everything we were taught to revere. He said the news was fake; so was history, political polling, our voting system, Constitution, and even science. His very language patterns – repetitive, incoherent, and verbally challenged – called into question accepted standards of grammar and eloquence we had become accustomed to in smooth talking politicians and “respected” public figures. In Trumpty’s eyes, all of that was bunk and fake too.
And he was right.
However, the rude irony is that the accuracy of Trumpty’s demythologized iconoclasm has been underlined by the very people that the wall he’s been sitting on promised to exclude. It’s immigrants and especially the Black Lives Matter activists who are successfully joining him in questioning (but from the other side) his white supremacist understanding of the world as well as our history, laws, language, and implementation of democracy.
Think about it: before BLM, who would have thought Americans would even consider demolishing statues of Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals, let alone of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other revered “Founding Fathers?” Impossibly, Americans are seriously rethinking the “official story” of their nation and engaging in righteous iconoclasm.
But the movement goes much deeper than that. As Robin DiAngelo has pointed out in White Fragility, the world’s ruling Caucasian minority is now coming to realize that society itself is rigged at its intellectual core – and in the favor of the white supremacists Trumpty promised to restore to greatness.
According to DiAngelo, it’s all a mirage – white culture’s beliefs in
- The supposed superiority of some forms of knowledge over others:
- White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European ways of knowing
- Written expression over oral
- History over memory
- Rationalism over wisdom
- Acceptance of the supremacy of scientific linear thinking that recognizes as true only what can be quantified, and peer reviewed by scholars
- The assumed neutrality of the white European Enlightenment
- The Ideology of individualism
- Meritocracy
For DiAngelo and Black Lives Matter, such convictions and white values themselves are arbitrary. And that includes its reverence for the king’s English. So is its philosophy of “work before play,” “planning for the future,” adherence to rigid time schedules, and governance of life itself by Apple watches.
Before BLM and COVID-19, none of that was questionable for the cultural mainstream.
Now it is. American culture, if not the entire world, is questioning its basic world view and way of life.
The whole turn of events has opened for humanity what Indian scholar Arundhati Roy has called “a portal” – an opening from old discredited ways of thinking and acting to new more credible ones. A door has opened to the other world Mayan wisdom has told us is now possible.
In other words, humanity is ceasing its efforts to reassemble Mr. Trumpty’s shattered reality and to reject his wall and all it stands for. We’re telling each other that the time has come to finally walk through today’s open doorway into the promised Aquarian Age that (at least unconsciously) we’ve all been longing for.
About Things That Matter 
Hi Mike,
The process of change takes time. Having watched immigrant families in my home town (my friends were mostly grandchildren of those who had immigrated), it occured to me it took 3 generations for a new culture to take hold. The signs of the assimilation were physically present in my young adulthood, symbolized by Millie’s Polish Pizza (that was the name on the sign) on Broadway. Very good, very big and loaded, and kielbasa on pizza is terrific. 🙂
So here we are between 3 and 4 generations removed from the cultural revolution of the 60’s. What was in fact a very small part of the citizenry calling for change has become part of who we are. I find that heartening, even as I found much or most of the intervening years disheartening.
Trumpty has done us a great favor by reminding us of what we will not tolerate, doing so without finesse, without the veneer of reasonableness that perpetuated harm in the intervening years. What he tapped into was real and, because he won, cannot be ignored: our country doesn’t work for those without privilege. This was never a secret, and it was ignorable. He has made the effects of intolerance impossible to ignore. Good.
thanks,
Hank
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I agree whole heartedly, Hank. It was a great privilege to be part of the 1960s and all those powerful movements that surfaced then. I too see what’s happening now in our streets as continuous with those Great Stirrings. And Mr. Trump has done us the favor of showing unmistakably that all the analysis that emerged then about “America’s” nefarious machinations throughout the world were not empty “conspiracy theories.”
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