Guns, unfortunately, for their manufacturers and sellers, tend to last a long long time. Which means that, in the absence of a cultural change of heart, there will be more and more guns sold per capita for them to stay in business. According to wikipedia, there are currently 88 guns for every 100 people in the U.S. That’s way more than any other country. But if those who manufacture and/or sell guns continue to do business as usual, if they continue the old American tradition of “the business of America is business,” they must continue to sell more and more guns!
Then there is the spillover of military-style weapons onto both police departments and the gun-toting citizenry. The usual: play both sides, start wars by supplying weapons to both sides, both the police and “freedom-loving” American public. Yep! Civil war in the U.S. is a perfect (if final) market for manufacturers that contract with the vast interconnected, unauditable military industrial complex to shunt off old, obsolete weapons! No wonder assault weapons are now the rage! And geez, we’ve got to use ’em or lose ’em, right? Got to make sure that investment pays off.
I’m not saying there is an intention on the part of anybody to kill anybody else. I’m just pointing out the way capitalism works, the way it keeps ramping up whatever direction it’s going in. For capitalism to work, it’s always growth at any cost, cancerous growth. That’s the name of the capitalist game, and if reasoned arguments that we live on a finite planet with finite resources don’t change our bloody minds, then perhaps this will. This recognition that our guns are now aimed at each other. Not just far away. Here. At home.
Until we recognize and transform our unconscious worship of predatory capitalism, we will continue playing this end-game all the way to hell.
Which brings me, once again — how many posts have I written on this subject? — to the electrifying aspect of (revolutionary) Uranus in tense square (90° aspect) with (death-and-rebirth Pluto), this rare geometrical configuration between two planets that dominates our solar system and the atmosphere on Earth from 2012-2015. Ye gods! Can we make it through these years without civil war?
I suggest that quite possibly, we cannot, unless we do recognize and begin to dismantle the deep structural mechanisms that drive predatory, shock-doctrine, casino capitalism and how it has warped our humanity to the point where we are in real danger of omnicide.
That eventuality is the curse of Uranus/Pluto. And of course, every curse can transform into a blessing: The blessing here is that this awful pickle that we have gotten ourselves into might be the very thing that forces us to WAKE UP! So that we stop the rush to madness; so that we actually pause for a long hard look at what we are so blindly heading into. So that we begin to listen to ourselves and each other. To our cries of pain, muffled by anger.
How far away we have gotten from who we really are! How much we all long to put down our manufactured arms and use our real, flesh-and-blood arms, for holding, hugging, while breathing a huge, audible sigh of relief that pops the balloon of thousands of years of increasing violence.
Yes, let us remember, re-member. Let us put ourselves back together again as one people, on one planet, in one glory-filled cosmos, singing and dancing with unadulterated joy. We can do it. There is nothing stopping us but fear. And F.E.A.R. (false evidence appearing real) is unreal. Only love is real. Love is, literally, all there is.
