You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom
The tiger in your tank or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat...
The revolution will not be televised

Gil Scott-Heron recorded those now famous lyrics during the Jupiter-Uranus sextile of 1971. The central idea behind the song's poetry is that the cultural revolution shaping the country at that time wasn't something that was broadcast over any normal channels of carefully procured media, but was instead happening in real life, under our feet, around our homes, and on our streets. The revolution can't be sold to us, made pretty, and solve meaningless problems.

During a similar Jupiter-Uranus sextile in early 1903, McClure's Magazine published its famous January issue that launched the muckraker revolution in journalism. This was the beginning of in-depth, scathing articles detailing the corruption and neglect in American society and in the secret halls of the behemoth corporate trusts. Muckraking was crucial to kicking off the Progressive Era, a deeply transformative period that ushered in some of the greatest reforms of American civil life, from food and drug regulation to national parks and legalizing women's right to vote.

Most of those reforms are better correlated with the Uranus-Pluto opposition of the time, as is the Uranus-Pluto conjunction with the reforms of the 1960s, just before Scott-Heron's famous poem. But Jupiter and Uranus together evoke more specifically the widespread dissemination of a social realization, a cultural shift made apparent, if not real, to everyone. Jupiter-Uranus alignments can bring about cultural epiphanies and creative solutions that catch the collective imagination like wildfire, because their time has finally come.

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Sometimes a technological invention will emerge that changes how we connect and interrelate, such as the iPhone during the Jupiter-Uranus square of 2007 or the issuance of Alexander Graham-Bell's telephone patent in 1877 during a Jupiter-Uranus trine. Or a scientific breakthrough forces us to reconsider our fundamental powers as humans, such as the first cloning of a mammal, Dolly the sheep, during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aquarius of February 1997.

Jupiter-Uranus alignments can also symbolize major catastrophe, such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in April 2010, which occurred during a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Pisces. Both ocean and oil are specifically associated with Pisces, and the catastrophic nature of the incident is best correlated with the intensely conflictual t-square alignment the conjunction was forming with Saturn and Pluto. Here we see the negative dimensions of our technological progress, the polluting, life-destroying combination of oil and corporate profit illuminated in one dramatic event.

Jupiter and Uranus can capture our collective attention and imagination with events that are deeply symbolic, even if they are mundane on the surface. One relevant example is the trial of O.J. Simpson, occurring during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of early 1997, which galvanized the public's attention onto largely ignored social issues, including celebrity privilege and the ongoing plight of a justice system skewed against Black Americans. Incidentally, it is quite the fascinating synchronicity that O.J. died a few days ago, at the start of another Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.

In all of these examples we see the combination of Jupiter's connection to culture, communal boon or bust, and its way of making things big, with Uranus's emphasis on social values, technology, and the collective cognition of entirely new perspectives, sometimes driven by major disruptions, that catalyze revolutionary action. Contacts by other planets to Uranus bring sudden changes that drive our future forward without any chance of going back.

Jupiter and Uranus are now entering into conjunction in Taurus, which reaches exactitude on April 20th, 2024. This occurs just before the Jupiter-Pluto trine (an alignment that also occurred during McLure's first muckraking issue), followed by the Uranus-Pluto trine that will last several years. These Pluto contacts deepen the shifts awoken by Jupiter-Uranus, and are just the beginning of many planetary alignments that will undoubtedly astonish us as this decade reaches its close. I don't think it's unrealistic to brace ourselves for erupting tides, sudden reversals of fortunes, or truths that come to light that forever change how we process this era of history.

When factoring together the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction with those planets' subsequent trines to Pluto, it is easily conceivable that we are on the cusp of a new muckraking era. Journalism that roots out the corruption in our Gilded Age-like corporate dominance and tragic wealth disparity, perpetuated willfully by powerful people at the top levels of business and government, may well begin to stand out in the headlines. Less "yellow journalism" and more "truth to power" will be evident. Like the music of 1971 that stirred the transformations forming in cultural consciousness, we may soon see and hear music and poetry becoming more political and harder-edged, evoking the social and economic problems of the day and the rage stewing underneath them. Whatever the collective discourse, it will likely play into the rising social tensions that will concretize during the Uranus square to the US natal Moon late this year and next.

In 1971, film cameras were expensive and largely owned by media companies. Television was still something of a middle class luxury, and people consumed televised media at a far lower rate than we do today. Now, with a smartphone in every pocket, a tablet in the hands of every child, and a television screen on every wall, car dash, and gas pump, televised media is more of a constant presence than an occasional distraction. The era of the early 1970s was also something of an epilogue to the revolution of the 1960s, whereas today we are just at the beginning of something new. Instant media coverage and public awareness of paradigm shifting events is essential to this particular era of radical change, so that this time, the revolution must be televised.

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