The Age of Aquarius

Who could doubt that the Age of Aquarius, whose advent was announced 41 years ago in a Broadway musical and trumpeted over the radio by a top-40 vocal group, is now in full swing? Only those who fearfully try to cling to the past, that's who.

Even Barack Obama himself, a cynical and calculating politician and newcomer to the political big time, seems to have missed the significance of his own elevation to the highest office. In 2009, a black family presides in the White House, Cinco de Mayo is a holiday everywhere in North America, and it's okay to be gay.

This is not your grandpa's American society.

And despite the howls of fear and rage from the right, it's now clear that the huge majority of Americans will no longer accept excuses for this country's failure to institute a rational health care system, like the ones civilized countries have, rather than treating citizens' health as a commodity to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It's as if the citizenry went to sleep one night and awoke to find themselves suddenly conscious and present, realizing that they have been deprived of their rights, and that (as Jefferson, so far ahead of his time, recognized) any government which doesn't exist to serve the needs of its citizens deserves to be sent packing.

In addition to fomenting a revolution in health care, Americans are suddenly and very dramatically awake and aware of the need for environmental activism. As world weather patterns and oceanic conditions have become increasingly unfamiliar and frightening, our collective responsibility for cooling the atmosphere has become obvious, and as a country and a people we will take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases in order to effect the necessary changes.

Climatologist Bill McKibben, writing in National Geographic and elsewhere, has even told us how much we need to reduce greenhouse gases in order to eventually return the planet to normal conditions. "350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," McKibben says, is the number that defines our future. We're over 350 parts per million now, at about 383, but McKibben and others have given us an achievable target, and a goal to shoot for.

And this brings us to the soundest evidence of all that the Piscean age is now behind us, that the Aquarian time has already begun, and that, in the words of John the Revelator, a new world has arisen, and the old one passed away.

I meet people every day who are suddenly aware of their responsibility in these matters, and knowledgeable that the old ways of doing things, from car dependency to the suburban paradigm to political cynicism, are not going to survive the changes we're experiencing now.

And we're not done. In fact, as the Grateful Dead sang in one of their earliest hits, "The Golden Road," "Nobody's finished, we're not even begun." We are going to go further and demand an end to the warfare state, with its prodigal waste of resources, its cynical and immoral "military Keynesianism" by which our economy is propped up by death and destruction, and its unacceptable cheapening of human life. Jefferson assured Americans of his time that they possessed a God-given, inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If they did, so do we, and we also have the right to pursue it in peace.

Expect more violence from the right. Their rhetoric has taken an ominously violent turn lately, and the word is the father of the deed. But in the final analysis, violence won't gain them anything but well-deserved disrepute. They're making a furious noise at the moment, but overpowering volume is no match for expanded consciousness, and the irresistible onrushing stream of history will carry their outmoded and fear-driven dreams of the past away like so many chips of driftwood.