So as if this election couldn't get any weirder...
Just this week, a CNN news investigation broke that NC Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who is African American and currently running as the Republican candidate for governor of the state, posted on a porn site where he referred to himself as a black nazi and advocated for slavery (!!!). There's more, but apparently most of the comments were too graphic to publish.
As I watched all of this unfold, my first thought was, what happened to this man in childhood?
A quick look at google confirmed my suspicions. Robinson has spoken openly about his traumatic childhood. He grew up in poverty, and was raised by an abusive alcoholic father where domestic violence was the norm. He and his (ten!) siblings were in foster care for a while, before they eventually moved back in with his mother after his father died.
Unfortunately, we do not have an exact birth time for Robinson, so I could only pull up a basic chart, but even then, there are several major aspects that speak to this unstable childhood. First, he has his Sun squaring his Neptune - an aspect that often points to an unavailable, absent, and/or alcoholic father (Neptune rules spirituality, but also addictions). Second, Uranus is squaring his moon exact, which can point to an unstable mother (let's not forget his mom was being abused by her husband) and also an unstable home life, since the moon is the traditional ruler of the fourth house of home.
It's hard not to feel empathy for someone who clearly went through so much as a child. But at the same time, one of the reasons why I love Western Astrology is because it emphasizes that we all have a choice in life, and while we may come here with certain challenges, how we choose to channel these difficult energies in our chart is ultimately in our hands.
Robinson could have chosen another path. He could have channeled his childhood trauma into advocacy for others, including domestic violence survivors, foster children, the poor, and families of addicts. He could have, but instead, he chose to project his experiences outward in the most hateful way possible.
MarK Robinson continues to deny that he made these posts, and his poll numbers are tanking. He's now trailing his democratic rival by double digits. His denial reminds me of this quote from the Jungian psychology book, Meeting the Shadow."The biography that the politician wants us to have - which has often been created by public relations people - is the persona, the mask. It's what hides the politician's true reality. Owning up to the shadow is not nearly as damaging in the long run as denying it."
Mark Robinson is not a dumb man. His sun and mars in Leo makes him an extraordinary public speaker and the potential to be an excellent politician. But when we don't process our childhood wounds, when we don't acknowledge the shadow within us, we can hurt others, and ultimately, ourselves.
I'll end with this quote from Jung: "What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate."
