The Crisis That Never Ended

[Eric the Green]

(03-26-2020, 06:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(03-26-2020, 01:08 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I accept Strauss and Howe dating in The Fourth Turning that says the unravelling began in 1984. That was the year that Reaganomics was cemented into the national psyche after the early years of his term when there was still much doubt about it and protest against it. 1984 was "morning in America" and all generations "acquiesed in indulgence" according to S&H. Yes, it's Mr. Howe writing the books now. He's good, but he doesn't get involved in discussion forums like Mr. Strauss used to do. Interesting that he died in 2007 and just missed seeing his 4th turning prophecy come true.

I know it doesn't match the books, but I think the Awakening proper ended about the time Nixon hit office, or perhaps the Democratic convention.  In the 1970 were a bunch of failures: Watergate, the Fall of Saigon, the Oil and Hostage crises, the National Malaise.  The feeling that we could tax and spend our way out of anything was gone.  The feeling that we wanted to tackle the big problems was going.  Things had begun to unravel.  I might not have hit fully until about 1984, but it was there sooner.

It's plausible, and at the time I thought the Awakening had wound down in the 1970s. As I discovered astrology, it made a lot of sense. When I wondered what was supposed to correspond to such a powerful radical and transcendental surge of activism and creative energy as the sixties was, astrology told me it would be an alignment of outer planets. So I looked up where they were in the book that shows this, and there it was. Of course, Pluto was still considered a planet then, and astrologers still consider it so, based on how thoroughly it indicates events. But Uranus and Pluto were indeed aligned in the sixties. Then I wondered, when was the sixties energy at its peak? It must have been when I felt it the strongest. That would have been when the conjunction was exactly aligned. So I looked it up, and the exact date was exactly when I thought it would be, at the end of June, 1966. 

Among the things that happened then, the National Organization for Women was founded on that date, and Stokely Carmichael declared "we want black power!" at the end of a march he and Dr. King led through Mississippi. The psychedelic culture was bursting forth and some of the best music of the period (or ever) was created at that very time.

But, planets are considered to be aligned only within a certain margin of degrees, or orb. When they separate, the alignment is over, and the energy wanes. That happened in around 1970. They had been within orb since about 1962. 

So there was the failure of the uplifting rebirth of idealism from the new assassinations to the Democratic Convention to the election of Nixon, Watergate, and the various kinds of mailaise that set in. Key rock stars died and the love-in festivals lost their lustre.

But the Awakening was not over, not by a long shot. Nixon signed the environmental laws that protected our air and water after the the biggest demonstration in history, Earth Day, in 1970. Consumer laws were passed too, after years of activism by Ralph Nader that had started in 1966. The Vietnam War did end and Vietnam was united, which was a victory, not a defeat, for the Awakening. The women's movement and the gay liberation movement continued and expanded. The anti-nuclear power movement got going in the late 70s. The gas shortage was an opportunity to start moving away from fossil fuels and conserve energy, and President Carter started us on that road in 1977. Although there wasn't another Woodstock, the tradition continued in the Grateful Dead concerts and the rainbow gatherings. The New Age movement brought the human potential and counter-culture trends to a focus and new authors gave it clarity around 1980. The Green Party was founded. Militarism declined because of the Vietnam Syndrome. By the late 1970s the New Left and Green movements that had started in the USA and broken out in France in 1968, along with other electoral trends already in motion, had transformed much of Europe into a democratic socialist paragon of advancement.

There was also a counter-awakening going on, which had started along with the Awakening itself in 1964. This movement was to take the United States of America and other countries in a contrary direction to everything the Awakening pointed toward. The tax revolt started in California in 1978, a cause which former CA governor Ronald Reagan took up enthusiastically. Jonestown discredited leftist religious cults in 1978 and added to the mailaise, but since 1971 Jesus freaks had inspired some hippies to become Christian fundamentalists. In the late 1970s the counter-awakening of traditional religious authority geared up, and the Moral Majority helped put Goldwater's ally Reagan in the White House, along with the help of wealthy power brokers who wanted to repeal the new consumer and environmental laws. Conservatives Thatcher and Kohl joined him in the new right-wing free-market anti-welfare power-trend. Anti-feminist and anti-gay movements appeared. New trends in pop music like Heavy Metal, Punk and New Wave rejected the sensibility of the psychedelic and folk-rock eras and emphasized simplified, blatantly-aggressive noise. So, the counter-awakening was as much a part of the 2T, and arguably more influential, than the Awakening itself. And all these counter-trends and counter-revolutionary ideas were born and were ramped up in the 2T, not in the following 3T when they just became the new normal.