This Thanksgiving – Look to the Stars

By Colleen O’Connor

Want a graceful prayer for this Thanksgiving? One that will help alleviate all the chaos, the fear, the divisions and the frustration gripping the country?  Or just change the topic?

Try quoting the great, Bette Davis’ best lines, in “Now Voyager.”

“Oh, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We’ve already got the stars.”

And do we have them.

Not just the zillions that twinkle the night skies; or the millions of frontline responders lighting up countless hearts in the midst of a pandemic; or the thousands of our neighbors behaving like grown ups, or the hundreds of of our family and friends that keep us optimistic, but also other standout candidates in a chaotic year.

Standouts like Stacey Abrams on whose shoulders the fate of the U.S. Senate and the nation now rests. She (and her wonderful crew) who, over the course of decades, worked to turn the former Confederate state of Georgia into a Biden win, and are now working to deliver two open U.S. Senate seats into the Democratic column.

That possibility could usher in the demise of Mitch McConnell and his Trumpian cohorts.

Or else what ?  Look to other stars. The celestial kind.  More entertaining, but equally powerful.

Literally, according to astrologers (not unlike the ancient Greek oracles) the planets Jupiter and Saturn presaged the current madness and are promising more of the same. Jupiter and Saturn, the “two biggest gas giants” in our solar system, are crashing into a “great conjunction.”

Make of that political metaphor what you will.

But, don’t laugh.  The “mystical services” aka astrological market, and their many apps, are estimated to be worth $40 billion; all to figure out the future. Back to Jupiter and Saturn for more clues.

“Jupiter and Saturn are about to line up perfectly in the night sky, getting so close on December 21 that they’ll seem to touch. The last time they looked this close from Earth’s vantage point was nearly 800 years ago, on March 4, 1226.”

Then there are the coming eclipses; with dire mega/ MAGA implications.

“Two eclipses lie ahead, a lunar one in Gemini (corresponding heavily to Trump’s chart, Tabourn warns) on November 30 and a solar one on December 14, i.e., the day the Electoral College casts its vote.

“This might be what astrologers have been bracing themselves for when they say autumn is ‘2020 part two,’” Randon Rosenbohm (@good horoscope) surmised.

“Things just are really not working, things are totally abnormal, and people don’t know how to behave, either. People are misfiring their aggression and misbehaving and acting like babies.”

Things have been “very, very messy.”

The “stars” also suggest it is unreasonable to expect anything else from 2020’s last gasp this fall. Meaning, “some astrologers expect a shitstorm due to that harrowing conjunction in January between Pluto and Saturn.”  You know, the swearing-in of the next President.

That planetary duo, again, portends, “basically totalitarianism, violence, pestilence.”

“We’ve been looking forward to 2020 for a really long time,” Rosenbohm adds.

“In one of my first astrology classes — this was before Trump was even elected — I remember someone said, Yeah, 2020’s ‘gonna be like the last election ever.”

Still, be thankful.   We are not alone. Help is out there.  Look, again, to the stars.

According to Nottingham astrophysicist Christopher Conselice, “There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth.”

Assuming we pass for “intelligent life.”

“If other technological civilizations last as long as ours, which is 100 years old, then there would be as many as 36 intelligent technical civilizations throughout the galaxy.”

Lots to be thankful for. Don’t be greedy. It could be worse.

Peter Turchin, a scientist, (who teaches cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut), correctly predicted, in the journal, Nature, that the year 2020 would usher in a period widespread civil unrest.

He now worries that those tensions “may escalate all the way to a civil war.”

Better, this Thanksgiving, to remember Bette Davis’ lines and look to the stars.

“Oh, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We’ve already got the stars.”