For background, a few snips from Mr O'Hehir's interesting essay:
.......But if you can separate the populist and/or military coup against Morsi’s government from short-term political or ideological questions, it fits into a much larger historical pattern that is global in scale. We live in an age of revolution, and specifically of anti-elite, anti-authoritarian revolution. It’s an age that began in earnest with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and shows no signs of slowing down. Edward Snowden, who on Friday was reportedly offered asylum by both Nicaragua and Venezuela, is in his own way a soldier in that revolution, one who has exposed the secrets of the world’s greatest imperial power and made it look both foolish and vulnerable. That’s the thread that connects this week’s explosive news out of Egypt to the bizarre episode of the Bolivian president’s airplane, which was forced to land in Vienna (almost certainly at the behest of someone in Washington), based on false rumors that Snowden might be on board. Screw national sovereignty – the most powerful nation on earth is hunting a computer nerd! In other words, both these things are driving powerful people crazy.
Indeed, historians of the future – assuming there are any – may well compare our era to the great wave of social and political revolutions that transformed Europe in the middle of the 19th century, and ultimately led to the sweeping away of the old aristocratic order. What the conclusion of our current revolutionary wave will look like, and whether it will sound the death knell for the dominant liberal-capitalist world order, I have no idea. But I feel certain that a lot of people in boardrooms, executive suites and presidential palaces are wondering the same thing.
Comments below the article were interesting, at least they were when they didn't descend into the usual skirmish between right and left, or snarks by the grammar/spelling police. One brave soul (cckelsey) even dared to say:
There are those who have studied astrology who suggest that Uranus-Pluto alignments correlate with emancipatory humanitarian impulses across the collective. From what I understand, we are in one of those alignments that will run through this decade though it is not as pronounced as the periods that offered the French Revolution and 1960's. From what I've seen presented, these periods tend to swing into Saturn-Pluto alignments which often offer authoritarian backlash.That was put down immediately by:
Agent C: @cckelsey I hope you're trying to be funny.Sigh! Double sigh!!
Commenter Graham Clark said (among other things):
Well heck, if we're going to allow for the twenty years of status quo between the dissolution of the Soviet sphere and the Arab Spring, we might as well go back another twenty and say the new "age of revolution" started in 1968.
He was right - and the 1960s do link back to Uranus-Pluto.
I couldn't see any Uranus-Pluto link in 1989, but there was a fairly rare triple conjunction of Uranus-Saturn-Neptune - in Capricorn that year. The conjunction linked the cycles of Saturn/Uranus (approx. every 45 years), Saturn/Neptune (approx. 35 years), and Uranus/Neptune (approx 172 years).
Looked at from one perspective, the period 1989 to the present (and onward) can be seen as a revolutionary age, still ongoing, for its full flavour hasn't reached the USA yet. While 1989 isn't part of a "matched set" of astrological aspects, it's another piece in the jigsaw puzzle - and fits right in, showing that certain points in the outer planets' cycles do indeed correlate noticeably with mundane events here on Earth. We ride the varied waves of time along with the planets.
From section 87 of one of the most often consulted favourite books sitting on the shelf under my desk: Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes ~
The people learn, unlearn, learn,
a builder, a wrecker, a builder again,
a juggler of shifting puppets.
In so few eyeblinks
In transition lightning streaks,
the people project midgets into giants,
the people shrink titans into dwarfs
Faiths blow on the winds
and become shibboleths
and deep growths
with men ready to die
for a living word on the tongue,
for a light alive in the bones,
for dreams fluttering in the wrists . . .
Sleep is a suspension midway
and a conundrum of shadows
lost in meadows of the moon.
The people sleep.
Ai! ai! the people sleep.
Yet the sleepers toss in sleep
and an end comes of sleep
and the sleepers wake.
Ai! ai! the sleepers wake! . . .
