Enter
the Jester
“Hope,
on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for
it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.
Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the
majority opinion; and one does that only at great political risk. On
the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose
pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to
which we have all made commitments is now called into question.”
Walter
Brueggeman (The Prophetic Imagination)
There is a pall over
America right now. It is as though a critical piece of the American
psyche had died, and we're all waiting for the funeral. In the
meantime, we're filing around the casket with vacant eyes. In this
deep and protracted period of mourning, we are watching an impostor,
a caricature, a cartoon person ascending. We keep trying to reshape
this bizarre fabrication into something palatable and recognizable as
our president, but it simply snaps back into itself like a twisted
balloon.
What the election of Mr.
Trump has done is expose the underbelly of a nation that thought of
itself as having “moved on.” Never mind the persistent bickering
and inaction of our government, and the grinding pace of social
change—we were used to that. Some even thought gridlock was a good
thing. Never mind the mind-numbing failure of our public schools, and
our ever rising medical costs. Forget those empty factory buildings,
and our crumbling bridges. Forget the flood of opiate addiction and
military suicide, and constant gun violence in our streets—we talk
about them, but only to tut-tut and move on. But this! How did we
come to this?
That's how we came to
this! All of the above is how we came to this moment. Somewhere along
the way, we lost hope of something better, and it took a profound
shock to wake us from our zombie trance. We have been sleep-walking
for a long, long time. But we're awake now, by golly! Activation of
the jester archetype is always jarring—that shape-shifting,
twirling, watch the world burn, coyote/joker is a change maker. Devil
may care, let's do it my way, create as much chaos as possible, and
see what happens. The great advantage of this is not the ascendancy
of Mr. Trump—it's the alertness of the American people. And now
that we're awake, what will we do? The hope for us, in my opinion,
and it's a great hope, is that our wonderfully creative capacity to
innovate, that alchemical spirit that changes lead into gold, is
alive and well, and will rise up and carry us through this time of
sweeping change. I have hope and I'll bet you do, too.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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