Doing client work during a global pandemic and recession hasn’t been easy. Every astrologer I know is booked well in advance. People go to astrology readings looking for self understanding, for political hope, and for permission to heal. People go to astrology readings looking for the same things because of the same problems as before the pandemic—bad relationships, bad jobs, and bad housing. It’s just that, because we are in a global health crisis, the problems start to get much bigger. People are more trapped by capitalism where it slows down, people get quarantined in domestically violent homes, and it is that much harder to find housing.
None of these people are alone. There are so many people going through the same things as they are. Lines of normalized division and the quarantine itself makes us forget this.
A lot of people, excited and scared, talk about the coming race war. Everyone is nervous about the situation getting worse and about the wealthy buying private security just to run errands in Manhattan. A lot of people embrace the militarism and talk of survival or fight plans, of buying arms, and of taking sides. This is Marx’s prophecy of armed class struggle.
Frantz Fanon asked revolutionaries whether they plan to buy arms from imperial arms dealers for their revolution. Assata Shakur spoke about how the last thing we want is a race war because power hoards all the guns, the bombs, and have a paramilitarized police force on their side. She wrote that they want a race war. Paula X Rojas write that any movement that a working, poor, single mother cannot participate in is a movement that is destined to replicate patriarchal, classist norms.
We don’t have to anticipate a race war. The history of this country is a race war. We are already in a race war because white supremacy happens to thrive in violence.
Violence is the master’s tool. He does not own your body, the skies, the land, or your knowledge. All of these things, at their heart, are disobedient things. Only violence serves him dutifully.
Revolution is much harder, more complicated, and less escapist than the anticipation of an imagined race war which hides the state’s true monopoly on violence. Revolution is feeding people, is childcare, is asking whether queer utopia displaces Black and brown communities, or healing with survivors, or asking young people questions, or asking elders questions, and is growing people with you. It’s making hard choices and taking risks for people. Revolution is loving despite shame. These things are much harder because they take real time and real relationships and don’t take place in a spectacular future event that only really describes the hidden parts of the present.
When in abusive homes, children sometimes fantasize about their abusers dying. All the while, they teach themselves real coping mechanisms that contribute to their survival. These real coping mechanisms are never glamorous and a lot of times they are shameful. Unglamorous coping mechanisms, not the death fantasy, save people. The death fantasy can be a coping mechanism, the same way the imagined race war is, but it should not be something that replaces real community transformation.
I’ve learned all this from my clients, and other teachers, during the pandemic and before. My clients teach me about the complicated act of resilience everyday. My indigenous clients have been teaching me that resilience is already all around us. They’ve taught me that resilience is not some new event that erupts into the sky like the protestors at the Boston Tea Party dressed in red face but, rather, that revolution is a lifelong commitment.
Doing astrology during a pandemic is hard but it’s the right kind of hard. It’s become a recommitment to client work for me. I’ve learned the most, not just about astrology but about politics and love and trust, from my clients. Doing astrology is not about technical knowledge but about heart knowledge. That is something that no one can teach you but something that you must learn from others.
