The Eclipse: NATO Protests, Mayan Prophecy, Global Awakening

The following article was originally published in greenewave.com.

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One of the major events that were expected as part of the Mayan 2012 prophecy happened today: an annular solar eclipse where the moon comes between Earth and the sun.

Meanwhile here in the city of Chicago, we hosted the NATO meetings this weekend. Nearly 15,000 people flooded the streets in protest. We also have reports of a bank run going on right now in Greece, foreshadowing the fall of the Euro, the disintegration of the continent’s monetary unit and Greece’s exit from the monetary union. This has the potential to create a domino effect, where later we may possibly see the exit of Spain, Portugal and even Italy from the Eurozone.

The banking cartel and the military industrial complex, in all likelihood, contemporary humanity’s two mortal enemies, face a serious crisis during this weekend’s eclipse.

Any gathering of NATO, a think tank for the global military industrial complex, would naturally inspire prophecies of evil forces battling good, but of course it shouldn’t take a prophet to understand that NATO is evil and at large.

The fact that parties in position of great authority work for them, from media to the police, makes the problem more obvious and more worrisome.

For years we’ve seen corporate-owned media spewing all kinds of propaganda paid for by war profiteers. Mainstream media has gone to great lengths in its efforts to place a burka around the inhumane and obscene realities of war and how a small, powerful group of people profit from it.  The discourse, which is wrapped in rhetoric of patriotism, uniformity, and loyalty, clouds people’s attention. Prominent media networks are known for accusing anyone of sedition who has the audacity to protest our intelligence being insulted and the persistent promulgation of lies. The “small wars” rather than the large of the previous administration are as insidious if not more so.

Yesterday a video and a picture was posted showing a police vehicle driving into a sea of protestors and almost running over citizens who were simply exercising their freedoms of assembly and of expression – guaranteed by the constitution. This was done randomly and for no reason in the midst of the Chicago protests against NATO.

This has received little to no coverage in mainstream media, and of course no independent investigation of the event has taken place because the perpetrators were in a place of authority. Clearly, the police see these peaceful, concerned citizens as the enemy, which can only mean that they’re not there to protect the citizens, but that they work for someone or something else. This is precisely why a larger number of people see both media and the monopoly of violence (police, military, etc.) as agents of a small ruling elite, the so-called “1%.” Their legitimacy is increasingly being questioned.










Also, the internet has democratized who gets to create news or be a commentator. It used to be that the small number of people who controlled mass media had the power to regulate reality, but we’ve seen how this power has been purchased by the powerful and, just as the decadence and dishonesty of mainstream media has become common knowledge, the internet has spawned numerous alternative media outlets that provide a populist slant and narrative of reality.

When people claim the identity of 99% of the population, and saying –as the online activist group Anonymous does– that they are legion, they’re affirming a new globalized, decentralized cosmovision and outlook. There’s even a new cube symbol that is being proposed for the Occupy and Indignado movements.

Some say the entire 2012 transition is an initiation into a higher plane of awareness, an evolutionary leap. Some say this is the dawn of the Aquarian Age of collectivism, cooperation, and interrelatedness. This webpage on the prophecies is one such source, and it calls our current 20-year calendar period or katún, from 1992 – 2012, the Time of No-Time since they are the last years of the sun’s 5,125 year cycle in the Mayan calendar. It goes on to provide details about the prophecy of the reunion of the condor and the eagle, euphemisms for South and North America. It ends with:

This prophecy means that the Indigenous People of the North and the Indigenous People of the South, through those of the Center, will come together to strengthen the recovery of the ancestral science; recovery of our identity, art, spirituality and Cosmo-vision on life and death that the different Cultures have.

Those of the center are, of course, the Mayans from Southern Mexico and Guatemala whose calendar has become the main theme of our generation’s prophetic discourse. The Global Illumination Council, which is very much in solidarity with the Occupy movement, speaks of new beginnings and an alignment with the Pleiades.

I personally don’t see a reason to believe in supernatural claims, but I find all of it interesting in view of many recent and current historical developments. I see new populist discourses developing, many of them focused on our interrelatedness, and I see a mythmaking trend in our hemisphere, particularly among the native peoples but also in Westernized populations, which seeks to retell and propose history.

We’re all reinventing ourselves and re-contextualizing ourselves in the midst of more changes within one generation than any other group of humans has seen. The internet did not even exist when I was growing up. We were cast into the information era in an evolutionary blink of an eye.

The poetry it creates, the imagery of the eclipse –the light is temporarily eclipsed by darkness–, the idea that there is a cosmic battle, all of this resonates with the collective psyche of humanity at this junction and I think this is appropriate language to understand this world and the times we’re living in.

Thomas Jefferson once said ‘When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; When the government fears the people, there is liberty.’ There is a sign that you would see at the boundary of the autonomous territory of Chiapas, which endured a long-repressed indigenous insurrection more than a decade ago as a result of NAFTA and its neoliberal agenda. It says:

“You are in Zapatista Rebel territory.

Here, the People Command and the Government Obeys.”

Indigenous groups have always been community-oriented, collectivist cultures and in Chiapas today all decisions are made communally, by vote and by consensus, not too different from how the local assemblies at Occupy make their decisions. Chiapas has become one of the most revolutionary examples of decentralization of power and participatory democracy on Earth, and of course a huge challenge to the state’s power.

It is here that the Mayans originally made their home. Chiapas is the cradle of the 2012 paradigm.