It’s a Brave New World

The Japanese word for bastard can take two forms: the first is kisama, which is bastard in a pejorative sense… the other is otoshiko, which is a bastard in its literal sense and the connotation for that is an unwanted child or thing… and then I had a dream… one wherein ALL humanity was the otoshiko… and that jump-starts this post of mine.

I want to start by saying that while looking at today’s political climate, I plan to incorporate traditional Japanese shinto thought and apply some of the lessons that I personally have learned into this… discussion of sorts (Ok, so maybe I’m low-key ranting).

First the Presidency. It started. But don’t worry. We have to ride it out for another 4 years. Doesn’t mean we have to sit down and take it.

A shift is taking place right now. A big one. Professors are talking about the state of the nation, one similar to the early 1900s; looking back in history as a point of reference, something we should learn from, is great. Immigrants were coming to America in large numbers and NY was home to some of the largest numbers of non-whites. It still is. They were the harbingers of change. Similar to our situation now.

Trump is President, and he’s NOT the lazy president we all thought he’d be. We see the (mainstream) media finally talking about it, right? HARDLY. Thing is TV or some newspapers used to be a source of news. Maybe even FaceBook on occasion. Nah. They’re not. They’re disconnected from what real news. All of us here probably report the news better than they do.

I had to open up Twitter to find out what’s happening. Crazy. I saw protests all around the world, pictures being shared by people WHO WERE THERE. All the frustration, all the raw emotion, it was there. No news outlet or pundit either to filter out the FACTS. I wasn’t limited to one image, or one voice, no, I had thousands to glance through…

So let me summarize my understanding of Shinto…

Shinto as a framework: Shinto is usually called an “Indigenous religion,” which is a bit of a misnomer, for it has no founder; it looks at the natural world as spiritual manifestations found all around us in the world.

These manifestations are KAMI.

Kami can manifest in anything seen sacred.

Shinto priests SERVED to keep the area around the kami PURE and SACRED, constantly flowing.

EX: river can collect weeds obstructing a pathway, and the PRIEST can move the weeds to prevent the stoppage.

Then there are the Kegare, and impurities, but that’s an older post of mine 

here!

(if you’re interested in reading it).

Why is this important? Even if we don’t believe in these KAMI, it’s important for us to be hyper-aware of our surroundings. We should never despair or fall into rage, because that is harmful to all of us. Like a river, we must open up ourselves up to all possibilities. Like a river, we must let everything flow right through us. The occasional yellow-haired oni (Japanese demon) may happen to flow right down the river. We must not close ourselves off like a pond, which can grow polluted.

The shinto priests believe that contact with impurity and corruption doesn’t just leave a stain on the body, but can leave a stain on the spirit. It’s why they have such a deep tradition with water, which is used in purification rituals. Water in motion will carry away any form of impurity. Without this motion (think of the river), we get stagnation.

It’s a metaphor (albeit an indiscreet one), which we can apply to attending school. One of the biggest possibilities school opens up is the possibility of diversifying.

That’s why we go to college. Not just to get ourselves a degree, but to EXPERIENCE people and their differing ideas. Cause in the end, we are all rivers who, flowing down each of our own individual mountains, form a collective ocean of knowledge we can extract from, to better ourselves and our understanding of one another.

But that’s not what always happens in the real world. Not everybody is so open.

Thing is that we’re in the world of superstars, where celebrities have a voice thanks to the millions of followers aggregating towards them. Whatever a celebrity says IS WHAT THEIR FANS WILL END UP PROJECTING. AND TRUMPS GOT A BUNCH OF ‘EM. 

SPIT AND SWALLOW.

Forget fact-checking, Mr. Dodo himself doesn’t know what a fact is. 

Superstars and tech moguls are decrying #muslimban, but it’s not like many of them were decrying TRUMP before, right? They’re all businesses. They’re beholden to their shareholders. Right now, they’re just shifting the way a business would. Gotta protect their employees and profits though. (POST-EDIT: I WROTE THIS WHEN NOBODY WAS CRYING OUT-LOUD, BUT NOW WE HAVE INDIVIDUALS LIKE ELON MUSK AND TIM COOK criticizing Trump. Bravo to them all!).

And us? Can’t we shift?

Sure. There’s lots we can do. No need to be like a static pond. Let’s become like rivers who flow endlessly, constantly shifting when the ground beneath us shifts, rising and falling like the mountain-paths.

Remember that dream I mentioned, one wherein I saw all humanity as the otoshiko? No idea why I had that dream, but I think it’s our social responsibility to be… active, I guess. Things’ve been changing with me slowly.

Have you seen the LAX hashtag?

Now that’s power, and we have it. Remember Marx, the dude who said something like the people have the most power? They have the numbers. We have the numbers. We gotta utilize it. Tap into that collective reservoir.

You don’t make change just from sitting home all day (sometimes you can but that’s after you’ve already made a LARGE following which probably involved you NOT just studying and reading books all day), no, real change comes with real-world experience, which I bet you I’m lacking in. It’s why I’ve been trying to go to marches and protests, to EXPERIENCE these events. To hear the voice of the people.

We have fours years till the next race, and it might be good to delude yourself that in time, everything will be fine, but MLK once said that:

“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair… time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

This dodo bird of a president is gonna come toppling down, and so don’t stop the movement, cause we have the momentum, we create the momentum. This isn’t some one-time gig. Let the people create a chain-reaction so that JUSTICE and TRUE DEMOCRACY will prevail.

Yours truly,

Onur A. Ayaz