PLUTO IN AQUARIUS

On November 19th, 2024, Pluto finally entered Aquarius permanently, and it will stay there until 2043. A little over two weeks later, we saw its effects with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Now, everyone everywhere in America is talking about the greed of the “healthcare” companies, and the words “deny, defend, depose” are being spouted by copycats. From a bird’s eye view, these events are absolutely typical for Pluto in Aquarius.

Pluto in Aquarius means revolution, change, and innovation. Humanitarian themes. Themes pertaining to technology. Themes pertaining to the power of the people, the collective. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius, the world saw the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Age of Enlightenment.

Pluto has actually gone back-and-forth between Capricorn and Aquarius from 2023 through 2024 due to retrogrades, although now it’s permanently in Aquarius. Curiously, I started writing stories close to the first time Pluto entered Aquarius in 2023, and once I decided to write the first novel of my series, I knew that I wanted a corporation to be the villain of the whole series. Pluto had first entered Capricorn in 2008 around the time of the Great Recession, and during its time in Capricorn there were themes surrounding power, government, and corporations. My family lost our home two years later, in 2010. Like many others, my parents were given a mortgage that they shouldn’t have been approved for, but that was a symptom of something much larger that was happening to us. In the early 2000s or so, my father had invented a certain piece of technology, patented it, and received one order for it from a huge corporation. After buying a big house, thinking he’d made it big, he found out the technology had been stolen by the corporation, even in spite of his patent. He was advised not to sue because the corporation would hire a team of lawyers to drag the lawsuit out for decades in the hopes of making my father go bankrupt and drop the lawsuit. We later found out that the other companies in that industry had also started using his IP, while we were ruined financially.

We spent my middle school years miserably trying to get rid of the house with no luck until my parents told my siblings and I that we were being foreclosed. Once my parents stopped making payments on the house and allowed the foreclosure process to take place, thankfully, we could afford enough food and have healthcare again. The foreclosure process ended up taking years and it wasn’t until the first day of my last semester of high school that our home was foreclosed. We weren’t given enough time, though, between finding out when it would happen and finding another place to move to, and almost became homeless. Once we secured housing (with great difficulty, as my parents’ credit was decimated due to the foreclosure), the day of the foreclosure came and we ended up throwing much of our belongings onto our wealthy neighbor’s lawn to keep them from being repossessed by the bank while a man stood there waiting to change the locks. We left our outdoor cat behind and I came back a few days later to find her. Thankfully, she came running when I called her and I got her in my car and brought her to the apartment we were renting. It would have been absolutely horrible if we had lost our cat on top of the trauma of losing our home.

I have no idea if any of my classmates at the time drove by and saw this, but I know some of them lived in that neighborhood. Many of my classmates’ parents also worked for the huge company that had stolen my father’s IP and were pretty well-off, so there wasn’t exactly much sympathy to go around. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was only the beginning of my experience with Pluto in Capricorn.

Now that Pluto is in Aquarius, I’m looking forward to seeing power shift back to the collective (obviously, given my history) and am hoping it can happen without further violence. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds and I hope that our society can transform into one that’s more humanitarian and positive.

By sharing my story, I don’t want anyone to think that I believe I “should be rich” due to my father’s invention. All I want is to be able to live comfortably without fear of one medical emergency or job loss resulting in homelessness, and that’s all I ever wanted. I want that for everyone else, too. I have utterly destroyed my mental and physical health at low-paying jobs where I would have been replaced without a second thought if I had dropped dead, all for the hope of a financially stable life. There’s something very wrong with that picture and my story isn’t at all unique or atypical. Every day people are destroying their bodies and minds to make ends meet. Enough is enough.

In addition to my own history with corporations, I remember hearing that the father of someone in my high school went into his backyard and shot himself in the head due to financial troubles in the aftermath of the Great Recession. That story has always stuck with me and I worry that in the coming years, we could experience more of that. I really hope that this time around we can make things better for everyone. But now, for the first time, when I see mainstream news articles posted that insult employees or try to manufacture support for the rich, the comment section is absolutely full of people speaking out against the wealthy and corporations, and in support of the working class. We are so close. Let’s give it a bit more time and see.