I have such a good reason to celebrate July 4 this
year. In fact, my wife and I are
planning to go to a nice little out-of-the-way place where we can watch some
fireworks and toast the Constitution, that slippery document full of idealistic
notions and weary compromises.
I’m not the most patriotic person in the world, having
spent about half my life living overseas. But I’ve been living in this country
now for nine years. And once I moved here, one of the first things I did was
get married (legally, this time) to the woman who has been by my side for the
last 35 years.
So thank you to the Supremes - my fallen hero, Ruth
Bader Ginsberg, plus Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Anthony
Kennedy – who voted for my right to marry. Thanks for believing that I have a right to
the pursuit of happiness. And now, after
all this time, my wife is also a citizen of the US. She was always an American,
but now she’s a Unitedstatesian. (I am hoping this word will catch on, so
please promote it for me.)
There are a lot of things that are starting to happen,
now that Mercury is direct again, and now that the Saturn/Uranus square is
breaking up (although only temporarily). Here in Maryland, masks are coming off, and restaurants
and theatres are opening. This is why we can celebrate out in the world, rather
than having bubbly in our bubble. This is
a new year for us, our first year as citizens of the same country.
However, a lot of the movement these days is
corrective. We’re all still recovering from a period of political trauma, as
well as the sorrow and fear of the pandemic. Mercury is direct in July, and
this keeps things clicking along. But currently, all the outer planets except Uranus
are retrograde, and Uranus is slowing down to retrograde in August. So we are trying
to make up for ground that we’ve lost. There is still so much to do, and there’s
a will to do it.
To fix what’s broken, people need to be held
accountable, and that’s a slow process. However, it is starting. The Trump
organization has just been charged with tax fraud, and its CFO was in court
today trying to explain why he didn’t have to fork out any money for his electric
bill, car payments, apartment rental, holiday vacations, and the other things that
exist in the budgets of the simple folk. Here we see some of the first cracks in this tower
of illusions and corruption.
And as Trump’s empire collapses, that condo in Florida
just collapsed, trapping more than a hundred people. I’m sure that will jar
more people into realizing that infrastructure is not purely theoretical. It’s
about concrete and air and water. Maybe they’ll write their congresspeople, and
suggest that something needs to be done, now?
There are a lot of things that we’ve thought of as
fixed, that are now in flux. But it’s a constant wrangle. Even though the Saturn/Uranus
square is no longer so tight, and it will keep loosening until October, there
are still impasses. There are still plenty of people wedded to the status quo,
deathly afraid of losing money, status or power.
In the House, things are busy. I keep getting notices
that my congressman, Rep. Jamie Raskin, is voting on one bill after another, and
all these bills pass. Sometimes the margins are slim, it’s true. The Republicans
vote to keep Confederate statues in the Capitol, to ignore methane emissions,
and to let military operations in the Middle East continue indefinitely. They are
pretty much okay with giving gold medals to the Capitol police who defended
their lives in the January 6 riot, but definitely not in favor of any efforts
to find out what the heck happened there.
But in the Senate, the filibuster hangs over every
bill like a guillotine blade. Even so, they’re negotiating, and infrastructure
bills are weaving in and out of the picture. And even though the Voting Rights
bill failed, it isn’t going to die. It will come up again and again, in
slightly different forms, like the demons rustling in the curtains in Mitch
McConnell’s bedroom.
Democracy is clearly as dangerous now as it was when
the Constitution was written. We can tell that by the way they keep trying to
suppress it. It’s not a miracle cure for everything that ails us, but it’s a
good tool, something we can work with – and towards – and then with, again.
We still have so much to do. But in my house, we just
added a new voter to the country. My wife and I watched Joe Biden’s little
address to new citizens, and I have to say, I got kind of teary eyed. I’m ready
to pop the cork, to toast this country, and to look up in the sky and say “Oooooh!” Happy fourth of July!
