Welcome to the Year of the Ox which begins on February 12, 2021 and lasts until January 31, 2022. The Ox is the second sign in the Oriental astrological cycle, which goes Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit or Cat, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat or Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. Therefore, we will be entering the second year of a cycle that began traumatically during the past Rat year.

In addition to the cycle of the 12 animal signs, the years are said to have affinities to the five elements – fire, earth, metal, water and wood, so that a complete cycle includes each of the animal signs with each element and lasts 60 years. This year will be the Year of the Metal Ox.

In this post we are going to look at what may be expected during the coming lunar year. This is not intended to be a psychic prediction or an astrological interpretation, rather it assumes that the cycles of the Oriental calendar are valid and that what is to come may be extrapolated from what has occurred in past Ox years. That takes a bit of analysis, so if you wish you can jump straight to the predictions by clicking here.

When I discussed the Year of the Rat last year, I pointed out that Rats do not have regular patterns like many of the other animals, so pretty much anything could happen – and it did. The Rat year gave us a global pandemic, raging wildfires, hurricanes, millions of people espousing conspiracy theories, an attack on the American Capitol and much more.

Last year’s discussion focused on the American presidential election and concluded that the stock market may be the best predictor for elections in Rat years. I said that if the S&P 500 average was above 3,470 on election day, President Trump would have a good chance to be reelected; if it was below 3,130, then there would probably be a new president. If the average was between the two, anything could happen. Well, during the year the average rose above 3,470 and it fell below 3,130. On election day it was between the two, so anything could happen – and it did. In the end, Mr. Trump was soundly defeated, but he refused to accept that fact.

Nevertheless, the election made Joe Biden the new president, and it is fitting to elect a new president in the first year of a new cycle of animal signs.

The Ox is often described as a hard working, grounded, loyal trustworthy animal and Ox years are seen as times of recovery and stability; times when justice and freedom are advanced through the processes of law and order. Looking to the past, though, it seems that those generalizations are only partly true.

As examples, let us look at the last two Metal Ox years, 1901 and 1961.

1901

In 1901, President William McKinley began his second term, but that lasted only until September when he was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt then became president. In Europe, Kaiser Wilhelm narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Military coups ousted civilian governments in Korea, Syria and the Dominican Republic. In China, the Boxer Rebellion came to an end and many of its leaders were executed.

The United States was involved in its own war, the Philippine-American War. A rebellion had started against Spain, which controlled the Philippines prior to the Spanish-American War, and the rebels had established a constitutional republic. After the Spanish-American War, the U. S. took control of the Philippines, and the rebellion continued against the new “rulers.” As the Year of the Ox began, the islands were being governed under martial law, and the war was winding down after perhaps a million or more deaths and terrible atrocities committed by both sides.

A month after he became president, Theodore Roosevelt invited African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House. Doing so caused anger and resentment among certain Southern Whites and led to a lengthy period of racial violence.

1961

The Year of the Metal Ox began in 1961 after the preceding Rat year had ushered in a new cycle with the election of youthful, Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as President of the United States. Some claimed that Kennedy had won only because of election fraud, but his opponent, Richard Nixon, declined to press those claims in order to spare the country a constitutional crisis. Politicians used to do that (and Nixon was saving his constitutional crisis for 1973, another Ox year). One of Kennedy’s first acts was to establish the Peace Corps, a volunteer organization that sent American citizens to many other countries to assist with economic development, health care, agriculture, environmental problems and similar issues, for periods of two years or more. The program has been quite successful and exists to this day.

Back it the USA things were not so peaceful. In 1960 the Supreme Court had decided the case of Boynton v. Virginia, ruling that public buses and bus stations were engaged in interstate commerce and must abide by federal anti-segregation laws. To test that ruling, multi-racial groups of mostly college students and young adults began riding interstate buses into the segregated South. They were called “Freedom Riders.” Time after time in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana the buses carrying the Freedom Riders were met by violent members of the Ku Klux Klan and racist politicians and police. Buses were set on fire and those on the buses were beaten and arrested.

The Cold War was heating up in other parts of the world during 1961. That was the year that the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall and President Kennedy made his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in the divided city. The U. S. also increased its support of the South Vietnamese government, sending thousands of advisors to assist in fighting against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

1961 was also the year that humans finally were able to leave our planet, as Soviet Yuri Gagarin and then American Alan Shepard were launched into space.

A recent term that has been overused is “cancel culture.” It seems that the term first came into common usage in 2014, though the concept is certainly much older. One general meaning is to silence a media personality or a political or business person by terminating his or her access to a public forum. That same kind of behavior generated controversy in 1961 when the University of California refused to permit speaking engagements by Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X and by the Henry Wallace, the former Vice-President, Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Agriculture of the United States and founder of the left-wing Progressive Party.

The Ox years since 1961 have shown similar patterns of lasting initiatives combined with chaos and violence.

1973

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed as was the War Powers Act (which was vetoed by President Nixon, but the veto was overridden by Congress). There was a brief ceasefire in the Vietnam War after the Paris Peace Accords were adopted. Fighting continued, though, including large scale bombing of Thailand until Congress finally forbade the use of any funds for military purposes in Southeast Asia.

The issues surrounding the War Powers Act were Nixon’s first constitutional crisis of the year. There was another when Congress, investigating the Watergate scandal, subpoenaed audio tapes Nixon had made of his conversations at the White House and Nixon refused to comply.

In March of 1973 the U. S. Dollar was taken off the gold standard. This followed a 10% devaluation in the Dollar during February.

Another war during that year began after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger failed in an attempt to broker a peace accord between Israel and Egypt. When those talks broke down, Egypt, along with Syria and Saudi Arabia attacked Israel. They were soon joined by troops from Jordan and Iraq. Within a month, Israel had defeated all of these invaders, but there were heavy casualties on both sides. Earlier in the year an Israeli fighter jet had mistakenly shot down a Libyan passenger plane, causing more than 100 deaths.

Racial violence and terrorism continued in the United States as well as the world at large. For instance, members of the radical Muslim Black September movement seized the Saudi embassy in Sudan, killing three diplomats when their demands were rejected. Here at home, the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized the small town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. That had been the site of a massacre of over 200 Native Americans in 1890 and symbolized the mistreatment of of Native Americans in the following decades. The town was quickly surrounded by federal marshals who negotiated and engaged in gun battles with the protesters for several months. The siege finally ended when the AIM members agreed to withdraw in exchange for promises of continued talks to address their grievances.

1985

Religious, political and racial violence and terrorism repeatedly reared their ugly heads in 1985. For instance French intelligence officers bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior, a ship owned by Greenpeace that had intended to protest against French nuclear tests. The Lebanese group Hezbollah hijacked a TWA flight and ultimately convinced Israel to release about 700 prisoners in exchange for the hostages. Later that year an Egyptian airliner was hijacked in Greece by Palestinian extremists. When the hijackers began killing passengers, the plane was attacked by Egyptian commandos causing 56 more deaths, including the deaths of all of the hijackers. Other Palestinians killed three Israeli citizens in Cyprus, which led Israel to retaliate by bombing PLO headquarters, killing 65 and wounding many others. Hundreds of tourists were killed or wounded in terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports.

A bizarre instance of terrorism was the hijacking of the Italian passenger liner, MS Achille Lauro, by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front. One passenger, an American, was murdered; but after negotiations all other passengers were freed in exchange for an agreement that the hijackers would be ferried to Egypt and then flown to Palestine. However, in order to obtain justice for the killing of the U. S. citizen, American fighter jets intercepted the flight to Palestine and forced it to land. A diplomatic stalemate then arose as the USA, Italy, Egypt and Yugoslavia (it’s a long story) each asserted jurisdiction over the case. The hijackers were eventually tried in Italy.

On January 28, 1986 – only a few days before the end of the Year of the Ox – the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff from Florida, killing all of the astronauts on board.

On a happier note, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. One of his first acts was to unilaterally freeze the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe and he began talks with the United States to limit deployment of nuclear weapons.

1997

The pattern of racial, religious and political violence during Ox years continued in 1997. An example is the killing of 62 people, mostly tourists, by Islamic extremists in Luxor, Egypt. As tragic as that was, there were hundreds of people killed by Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka and hundreds more during fighting between two main political factions in Cambodia. Even more disturbing, thousands of civilians were massacred by Muslim extremists in Algeria who were protesting the adoption of a new Constitution.

As now, the impeachment of an American president was in the news at the end of the lunar year. Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which he falsely denied – such lying, including lies under oath, led to his impeachment, though he was not convicted by the Senate.

The American stock market crashed on October 27, 1997, with major averages falling more than 7% in one day., though they did recover by the end of the year. 1997 was also the year that Britain’s Princess Diana died in an automobile accident in France.

Among the good things that happened in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed by nearly 200 countries as a major step toward the control of greenhouse gases. The Protocol has still not been ratified by the U. S. Senate. Also, the United States banned federal funding for any human cloning research, and such research was prohibited in several European countries.

2009

The most recent Year of the Ox came in 2009, and again it was a year marked by violence. In China, there were deadly clashes between Han Chinese and Muslim Uighurs; Muslim extremists caused a number of deaths in Pakistan; in Sweden “anti-fascist” leftists launched attacks on their political opponents; there were strikes and violent demonstrations in Guadalupe; intermittent warfare continued between Israel and the Palestinians; at Ft. Hood, Texas a Muslim army psychiatrist killed 13 soldiers and wounded 28 more.

That year also saw a different kind of violence – violence for profit. In Mexico the government was in a virtual civil war with various drug cartels. In Africa pirates seized several ships off the coast of Somalia and exacted large ransoms. The practice was stopped after French commandos forcefully rescued a French ship and Navy Seals rescued American ships.

It was also a bad year for diseases. In Zimbabwe, tens of thousands of people were infected with cholera and many thousands of those died. Much of the world was also battling the Swine Flu. Other countries did more to contain the flu outbreaks than did the United States, as can be clearly seen in the statistics. For instance, India and China, both of which had populations of more than a billion, recorded 505 and 30 deaths, respectively. The United States’ population was less than a third of those countries’ but it had more than 4000 deaths. That sounds eerily familiar as we now face the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was also another year in which there was a major stock market crash. The major indices dropped to their lowest levels in years during March, but then recovered, launching a bull market that continued for more than a decade.

Despite the violence and unrest around the world, efforts were underway to try to bring peace through diplomacy. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, even though he had been president for only a few months, and had not yet accomplished very much.

The “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, died during 2009. His memorial service was attended by thousands of fans and was broadcast to millions throughout the world.

1949

We have looked at some of the important events in the five Ox years of the last 60-year cycle, and several trends are apparent. Before continuing, though, we would be remiss, in a post about Chinese New Year, not to mention that the People’s Republic of China was established in the Ox year of 1949 after Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces were defeated by the Communists and forced to withdraw to Taiwan. That was also the year of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear weapon test, showing that Communism was advancing and ushering in the Cold War.

2021 AND BEYOND

While Ox years are often described as times of recovery and stability, due to the traits of their namesake animal, the recovery usually comes through suffering and the stability is only in nascent form. The American presidential cycle reflects the place of Ox years in the Oriental zodiacal cycle. The first year of the cycle is the Year of the Rat, which is always a presidential election year. However, since the inauguration of the new or continuing president does not occur until January 20 of the following year, any significant movement forward does not begin until the Year of the Ox, the second sign of the zodiac.

One unfortunate but constant theme of past Ox years has been violence – racial violence, political violence, religious violence, violence for profit. Such violence is a problem as we start this new year, and it will most likely remain a serious problem in the coming months. However, we will probably see greater efforts being made to resolve the underlying causes of the violence.

The biggest story from last year was the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic will continue into this next year, though major steps will be made to control the disease.

We have not said much about the economy in Ox years, but economic matters are quite important in people’s lives. Generally, unemployment has been relatively high and inflation low during Years of the Ox, so that may be expected in the coming year. Gold and precious metals have not moved significantly in Ox years, with the changes mostly being down by a small amount. The stock market is expected to rise somewhat during the year, but there will probably be a major downturn before the indices ultimately move up.

Internationally, the coming year should find more attention focused on Africa and the Middle East. China will probably continue to expand its political and economic influence, especially in Asia. Russia and the United States will both be focused on recovery from the Covid pandemic and its effect on their economies. Improvement will be slow but steady. The United States will also see many policy changes that will prove quite beneficial over the coming years.

We should also look for scientific advancements in the space programs of various countries.  The American Perseverance Rover is scheduled to land on Mars in the first week after the New Year, following spacecraft from United Arab Emirates and China arriving during the final days of the Year of the Rat.

Since this is an Ox year, progress on all levels depends on hard work and good faith. The countries that will take that approach are those that will benefit. That is even more true with individuals. Almost anyone can improve his or her life, but they will have to work for it.

Gong xi fa cai. Gong hey fat choy. Happy New Year.