Venus Renegade - Part 3: Rethinking the idea of enemies
My silent, fleeting friendship with the MAGA moms
This is part of a series I’m writing throughout this Venus retrograde reflecting on our activism over the past eight years. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Pop culture has given planetary retrogrades a bad name, especially Mercury retrograde. But true astrology devotees know that when a planet stations retrograde, appearing to move backward in the sky, it’s a time to self-reflect and to do an honest review of the areas of life that planet is said to govern.
Venus (ruler of relationships, feminine energy, queer folks, pleasure, harmony, beauty, unions) has been retrograde for the past four weeks, so I’ve been reviewing our approach to activism through this lens, asking myself questions like: how is my community activism aligned with my personal values… or not? What are my relationships like in the activism space? How is my approach to advocacy different now than it was during this same Venus retrograde period back in 2017?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking a critical eye to my relationship (or lack thereof) with folks who I’m supposed to consider my enemies.
This reflection began during the hours I spent listening to the hearing in the Texas House on the “school vouchers” bill, which I wrote about in my last post.
This Austin Chronicle article does a stellar job of explaining what’s going on with the fight over school vouchers in Texas, especially spotlighting the MAGA moms who I found myself sharing an unexpected camaraderie with in a stuffy room on the Capitol grounds.
This is the hearing room where the Texas House Public Education Committee meeting took place:
If you are watching the hearing inside that room, you can’t eat and you have to be really quiet — if you have vocal reactions to what’s happening in the hearing you’ll be reprimanded by legislators or asked to leave by a state trooper.
Because there was so much interest in this bill, hundreds of people showed up to testify and to watch the hearing, which meant they couldn’t all fit in that room. To accommodate all those folks, the hearing was broadcast live to a couple of different overflow rooms where people could watch.
Hot tip: while there is a powerful feeling to being in the hearing room itself, the overflow rooms can be WAY more fun. This is where you have some freedom to react to the wild things that get said in a hearing.
After hours in the overflow room, slouched down in my seat like a middle schooler in detention, I had started to feel a kinship with the unruly strangers around me. We all hooted and hollered together when a Republican called out the Governor and particular reps for doing the bidding of the billionaires who had bought their elections. We groaned together when Rep. Dutton (the Democrat who voted with Republicans to ban gender-affirming care for trans kids last session) went on yet another rambling tangent about the Catholic schools in his parish. We scoffed together when testifiers from one specific Christian private school came up one after the other and received copious praise for their testimony from the committee member who had clearly cherry-picked them to come.
I started to think of the people around me as my buddies. We were a ragtag team! Very Breakfast Club vibes.
So when one of my new buddies-who-didn’t-know-they-were-my-buddy got called up to testify, I watched in shock from the overflow room as she railed against school vouchers for reasons very different from my own.
She didn’t want taxpayer money going to private schools because some of it might end up going to Muslim private schools in Texas, “and I know my fellow Republicans and I certainly don’t want that.”
Yikes.
Okay, so maybe we weren’t gonna be besties after all.
And yet…
The experience I had in that overflow room left me thinking hard about the possibilities of making connections across divisions. It made me realize how rarely I am in proximity to folks on “the other side.” But in proximity lies possibility! That kernel of camaraderie I’d felt gave me a sense of hope that in a vast and raging sea of discord there are a few life rafts of alignment we might be able to cling to.
I realized, too, that if I think of everyone on “the other side” as my enemy, I will always be in a combative stance, which destroys any possibility of connection and deepens the rift.
I remembered a time last legislative session when I was in the Capitol Cafe to get a snack while a committee was on break. I smiled broadly at the white-haired lady next to me in line, true to my “every stranger is a friend I haven’t met yet” nature. She smiled back kindly before we both looked down — me at her red shirt marking her as a member of the “other team,” her at my rainbow earrings and trans flag sticker. Our smiles froze and then faded as we looked away from each other, slightly embarrassed — sworn enemies who briefly mistook each other for friends.
But what if we had followed our natural, Texan instinct to be friendly? After all, “Friendship” is our official state motto. What if we’d sat down together and had a human conversation over our Frito pies?
When I asked my tarot deck for additional wisdom on this subject of political enemies, I pulled the Two of Cups.
In the Our Tarot deck, the Two of Cups is associated with the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby — an unlikely pair with a 16-year age gap who ran away from their wealthy families to be together in an eccentric cottage in the Welsh countryside in the late 1700s. According to the Our Tarot guidebook, “‘lesbian’ wasn’t in the collective consciousness as an identity” at the time, thus “the people around Eleanor and Sarah found them to be a curious, interesting, and even sentimental pair.”
This got me thinking about the freedom that can be found outside of labels. What is possible in relationships when they are allowed to exist apart from a set of societal rules? It meant a magical, imaginative life without restriction for Eleanor and Sarah’s love. But what could it mean for cross-political relationships if we could step away from labels and teams?
In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the Two of Cups carries a message about the power of emotional exchange in creating connection and advantageous negotiation. Cups represent emotion in the tarot, and they are associated with water signs in astrology — kind of perfect considering the Venus retrograde just moved from fiery Aries into watery Pisces, which is thought of as perhaps the most emotional of the signs. The Two of Cups is a card of union — unions fall under the governance of Venus.
The figures in the Rider-Waite-Smith Two of Cups are looking each other in the eyes, exchanging cups (emotions) in a mutual show of vulnerability, trust, and respect. The lion head represents an element of heroism or danger in the transaction, and doesn’t that resonate when it comes to the idea of building relationships with those we’ve been told are our enemies?? The fact that the lion head has wings connects it to Mercury (the winged messenger and the planet of communication), showing us the profound transformations that are possible when we summon the courage to have brave conversations.
So these days I am asking myself… what can I do to put myself in proximity with those who’ve been labeled “enemy” to me?
What happens if I remove the label of enemy?
Where can I look for vulnerable emotional exchanges that could result in newfound mutual understanding?
What new possibilities emerge when I am willing to bravely engage with those I’m not “supposed” to engage with?