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remarks of everyone else the Crab knows will seem like fragrant roses of compliments by comparison, and it all evens out by making life in general smoother for Cancer.
It's sort of like when you've been crying over a toothache, and suddenly you break your leg. You forget all about the throbbing tooth. Or when you've been fussing and complaining about a small bee sting on the end of your nose, and along comes Sag to crack you over the bean with a verbal baseball bat. The only courteous thing to do is to thank Sag for curing you forever of sniffling over bee stings, right? A few stitches, and your head (or self-confidence) will be like new again. Now the Archers will be nodding, thinking these observations are all quite logical and philosophical. Some of them may even be saying, "That's true!! Every cloud has a silver lining." (Sagittarians are equally as fond of that Pollyanna truism as Librans.) Admittedly, it's not always easy to view a Sag as any sort of silver lining when he (or she) is aiming the Jupiter bow straight toward your Achilles heel, but the truth is that the Archers are optimistic. Nearly as much so as Libra, but with a touch more skepticism.
There are times when the sensitivity and sympathy of Cancer combined with the direct candor of Sagittarius can be a favorable blend of qualities, resulting in some very clear thinking, whether they're blended through an association between an individual Crab or Archer - or combined within one person, such as a friend of mine, who's a Sun Sign Cancerian, with the Moon and Ascendant in Sag. One day when she dropped by to visit me in my home, she was looking through a current, popular weekly magazine, trying to locate a certain advertisement she wanted to show me. After a moment or so, she found it. "Just look at that," she commanded, her eyes full of Lunar tears, but her voice full of Jupiter anger.
It was a double-page public relations promo for the Martin Marietta Company, the people who make some nice and necessary things, like cement and aluminum, but who are also among the industries we can thank for many of the chemicals that threaten our health and safety, possibly our survival. The ad was plugging a 4-H livestock competition fair in west central Illinois, because the Martin Marietta Company believes that 'traditions like this are a basic, enduring strength to our country, for the good of us all, well worth preserving… to make America better for everyone.
Taking up most of the space is the double-page ad was a colour photograph of a small boy named Troy, age eight - posing with bright eyes and a happy smile beside his Hampshire gilt, a blue-ribbon winning, 236-pound market hog that Troy calls Betsy. The prize hog was velvety soft and plump, a beautiful midnight blue colour, with a curly tail, trusting eyes and appealing, floppy ears. In he picture, the little boy was lovingly stroking his gentle friend, Betsy, with so much pure, childlike love and affection in his expression.
"I wonder," said my Cancer-Sag friend, "if they would dare to publish a photograph of little Troy watching his dear friend he'd grown to love as a pet, being slaughtered (which, of course, is Betsy's inevitable destiny) so folks can have their morning bacon. Would they dare to publish the terror and shock and agony in the eyes of an innocent child as he watched the Betsy he loved so much being brutally butchered? I suppose children like Troy are just told, after they spend months grooming and learning to love a 'market animal' that 'Betsy' or whoever, has just gone away on a pleasant visit somewhere, and probably won't return - to explain the disappearance of a beloved pet who's been carted off to the slaughterhouse to be murdered when the child isn't looking. They're such sick, misguided hypocrites. If they think slaughtering our animal brothers and sisters is such a beautiful, traditional thing, why don't they have the courage to publish the end of the story - show us the expression on a little boy's face when he learns the cruel truth about what adults really plan to do with the animal he adores, his reaction to all the gushing blood and the pathetic squealing and screaming in fear and agony that deafens the ears in a slaughterhouse, not to mention the stench of death
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