By Dawn’s Early Light

I was up at dawn this morning – before dawn, in fact. We had a power cut here last night; it came back on just after four this morning. I’d forgotten to turn off our printers and they made a heck of a racket powering up. So I got up to turn them off, along with all the lights; knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get any more sleep (B snored through it all – an earthquake wouldn’t wake him sometimes) I stayed up.
Turning on the ‘puter, I found over a hundred posts from an astrology email list I belong to. Most of the list are American – they were nearly all expressing their shock and despair that Bush had got re-elected (the exception was the list’s lone Repuplican, bravely batting for her side). Most of the list’s non-USians were asking how such a thing could happen.

For the average American who chose Fascism over freedom, you have, with your vote, destroyed a great nation and placed the world at risk.

was pretty representative of the tone of these posts.
For several of the Americans, it was clear who had won the election for Bush. This post pretty much sums it up:

the exit polls overwhelmingly list republican voters deciding their choice on …would you believe it?… moral values!!!
GWB opposes gay marriage and abortion. What these two issues have to do with the pressing, pragmatic issues of government I will never know, nor understand. Apparently, the electorate sees them as vitally important to the security of the United States in the world and to the stability of the US economy.
GWB is easily the most immoral, unscrupulous, overtly corrupt president in living history. The spin his people employ is openly and aggressively deceptive. He has shown unwavering contempt for international law and been unyielding and unrepentant in his contempt for civil liberties and social reform.
His only true loyalty lies with big money and big business. Nevertheless he wins on moral values.
The parallel to a certain fan of Wagner is not lost on the rest of the world either.

Other posters quoted the number of private Christian schools that had been set up in America; Virginia apparently now has no publicly-funded schools at all and nearly all of the schools there are Christian-run, teaching (like all US Christian schools) creationism, the Bible and the American Way. These schools are turning out entire generations of intellectual midgets and emotionally-stunted, small-minded bigots who see someone like Bush as their guiding light in an endless night of sin and darkness.
I heard similar views expressed on the news programmes – it was the evangelical vote that got him him, and they were voting purely on gay marriage and abortion and to heck with the rest of the world and ‘Godless’ Americans. Turning to one of my favourite US bloggers The Slacktavist, I found worrying confirmation.
It’s beginning to look like this will be a nasty few years for the world.

So, for some relief, I went outside and watched Venus and Jupiter rising in the Eastern sky; two jewel-like, sparkling dots of light, one above the other; and a half-moon in the South. And the black velvet sky turning to deepest blue, and the geese calling from the loch, and Carole’s cat gliding ghostlike along the fence….
My heart soared and I looked and listened to all this beauty; I traced the constellations and figured the astrological aspects and patterns – Venus and Jupiter both conjunct my South Node right now – what did that portend -? As I loked and thought and figured, I felt something on my bare foot, looked down and found a large earthworm crawling over my toes.
I laughed. What did that earthworm portend? God, Goddess, or Whatever, only knows! As one of my other favourite bloggers says:

God decided, and what He willed, He did.