Good morning, everyone. I’m happy to be here. I’m also here to be happy.
I introduce today the trickster, also known as heyoka, a raven, a coyote, Sacred Clown, Hermes, Krishna, or maybe even the snake at the garden of Eden. According to legend, there could be a trickster in our midst, they are born breach (entering the world backwards), they may be dyslexic, they promote radical egalitarianism and mock all tyranny, they risk their reputation, walk into trouble and they embrace uncertainty, if they don’t create it, they are out-off-the box thinkers, they look younger than their age, and have insatiable desires.
Eshu is the trickster of the Ifa religion, of the Yoruba people, from Nigeria. (Uhm, that’s in Africa. One can never really be to sure these days if people would know where Nigeria is.)
It used to be the largest religion. Eshu is the spirit that jumps at you when you are at the crossroads to jolt you from your indecision. Just when you’re dilly-dallying, boom!
A jolt will not always feel good. It will not always be comprehensible. It will not always result in rational thinking or behavior. It’s like the jolt of falling in love. But the imbalance is precisely directed to find a new normal. According to tradition, tricksters are not always well-meaning. In fact they have always been depicted as thieves, snatchers, insatiable feeders and maters, and deceivers. This is why the trickster and the devil had been confused in some religions.
But the trickster’s purpose is not for you to fail. Tricksters are self-sabotaging spirits for the purpose of you cursing them, not you being damned by them. There are legends of the raven cursed to eat itself, or Krishna cursed to always look for butter and sex, or the monkey God getting defeated by a new order, Hermes being busted by Apollo.
So how do we know if it’s the devil or the trickster again? For instance, if we all are damned to fail this political crisis, we might say Trump and Bannon were the devils. But if we are jolted from the indecision of the crossroads then we could say they Trump and Bannon are just the tricksters.
Now some people would rather prove that these two are the devils to the point of letting everything fall apartand fail and even let people die. They rant on Facebook and all, but still continue to normalize their privileges.
For instance, I wouldn’t really call it privilege if people had to die and get persecuted just so you could be specially treated. A person in my class once said, “I know I have privilege because I can walk into any hotel to use the restroom and no one will object because I’m white.” I wouldn’t flail a gun that just was involved in a mass shooting and say, “See this? This is power.” It’s sheer hatred and racism that puts it together, it is not privilege. What is privilege is Asian-Americans have a higher median income than any race in America. In 2000, white women earned 92 cents for every dollar earned by Asian women. In 2014, white women earned 87 cents for every dollar earned by Asian women. This is from a study published in Forbes Magazine. Asians don’t go around saying with pretentious guilt, “We are privileged.” See it’s not about income or class, it’s about being beneficiaries of racism and hate and making a cuulture of being more cool than others. The attitude of being “too cool to care” is a whitewash of being apathetic and ignorant. I don’t know if the Fonz thought research and education was a form of social action. Then you got Bart Simpson who gets away with ignorance.
In the Philippines, we have been welcoming foreigners in our 7,100 islands since ancient times. Just when Westerners were still trying to prove that the world is not flat with their voyages, we have already been interculturally mixing with Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. Asians have been robustly traveling from one country to another. A relic, now known as the Manunggali jar was discovered in one of our caves that dates back to 710 BC, shows an image of a traveling people on boats. And 500 years before we were supposed to have been discovered, we have a relic of a Hindu god in gold.
In the wars of the 20th century, we have been welcoming refugees, including more than a thousand jews from the Holocaust, half a million vietnamese from your war, thousands of Russians fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, Chinese people fleeing the Japanese invasion, and lately, we welcomed 6,000 refugees fleeing persecution from Burma. And yet, despite having 2 revolutions per generation, we are now 2nd fastest growing country in the world, second to China. We are top of the world in gender equality at number 7 among Scandinavian countries, our literacy rate is at a high of 95%.
But who puts that in your news feed? Friend me up on FB and you’ll get the jolt.
When colonizers came they failed to see the sophistication of our welcoming culture. They just found us unrespectable and naïve. Yet now the West calls on all to engage in radical hospitality, declaring churches sanctuaries, for instance, because we know in our bones that’s how evil is averted. It’s not like you have to be threatening, big and strong to practice radical hospitality. Trickster may be tricking you now.
Colonizers also saw our communal living and mocked what they said was a low level of sentience, like monkeys congregating, but now as you face a fascist regime, you call on everyone into beloved community, drawing others into yourself, drawing more people into our churches.
Colonizers discovered that we had different tribes, separate and distinct, and thought we had no sense of civilization, but hegemonies have been proven precarious and empires soon learned as they toppled in every corner of the world that diversity is what makes a people ungovernable and resilient as each tribe helps the other.
So here we are. We have been venting on Facebook, haven’t we? We have not been sleeping since November, haven’t we?
Around this time, 31 years ago, from February 22-26, the Philippines shocked the world when the 20 years of dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was abruptly ended by 3 days of bloodless, peaceful uprising. Previous to this, there had only been two peaceful bloodless revolutions which Filipinos have no knowledge of, Paraguay in 1811 and Denmark in 1848.
The 1986 peaceful uprising in the Philippines inspired many peaceful regime changes. After the Soviet Union collapsed, all the Eastern European governments were vulnerable to anarchy, coup d’etas, chaos, and power grabs of any sort. But the 1986 uprising in the Philippines inspired them to come together and uphold the will of the people. Many other social and political cataclysms brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the manner which we now call “The Atumn of Nations” like the “Arab Spring” was largely inspired by the our people power revolution.
There are many reasons why these fail. The formula of our uprising is not easy to guess, but because we have done it 3 times, we already know enough to teach you how it works.
Right now, there is an opportunity with Republicans falling away from Trump. There have been many chances for naming the “shock” that is needed to jolt the system. The mass shootings? Water for oil battle in Standing Rock? Black lives being gunned down? Muslims being persecuted? How many movies does Michael Moore have to make?
Any of these could have been the jolt needed to grind down to a halt. What if finally we get our act together and finally put people over corporations, water over oil, health over material ownerships, relationships over egos, etc.,
Dear American we need new tricks. United diversity overhwhelms. Let it say: ACLU against Trump, Women against Trump, Asian Americans against Trump, Harvard Students against Trump, Native Americans against Trump. Form a broad coalition statement. Articulate the new vision, but don’t stop there like what happened to the Occupy Movement. It failed, because it didn’t have the catalytic shock that divided leaders.
You must choose what event may be "the catalytic shock" from which the manifesto will arise. In other countries, “the catalytic shock” can be in the form of a shocking currency devaluation, or a death of a movement leader, a shocking crazy law. Actually you could choose when you want to be shocked and come out with a statement that divides the powers-that-be.
Then when you are out there and getting everyone’s attention, so threatening to the status quo, and they will ask you how you want the change served to you? Start with a simple doable plan like, “Impeach Trump Now!” The subtle threat is, “Do it now or there shall never be peace again.” Then keep on disturbing the peace until this is achieved.
Let me close now with something Rumi said, “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”
Times are not normal. They haven’t been in a while. May the trickster be with you.
