The Subversiveness of Play
A few months ago, I wrote a blog about attending my community’s “Hands Off” protest.
This was in response to the Trump administration’s gutting of federal grants and programs that make life better for all of us including support for scientific research, access to health care, foreign aid, and environmental protections, among other things. The gist of that post was that playfulness is a powerful magnate for attracting engagement in Serious Business.
This past weekend, I attended our “No Kings” protest, this time in response to Trump’s recent politicization of the military. The demonstrators were just as creative in their signage. I still heard cheering and laughter. I still observed good-natured camaraderie. Despite this “fun” atmosphere, though, the overall mood felt tinged with a hint of fear.
A sense of fear is warranted. Last week the Trump administration federalized the National Guard against U.S. citizens in Los Angeles and an extremist assassinated a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota (with plans targeting 40 or more).
One could reasonably argue that fear is exactly what those in power seek to instill. As international best-selling author Paulo Coelho writes in The Devil and Miss Prym, “If you want to control someone, all you have to do is make them feel afraid.”
What can any one of us do against such massive abuse of government power, especially when it is endorsed by (or at least ignored by) the powerful millionaire and billionaire classes?
We can play.
Play? I know, WTF, right?!
But, I would argue that playing is more important now than ever. Why? Partly because play is an act of subversion. When we play, we become dangerous to the powers that be because play invites us to question the status quo. Through play, we realize that rules can be changed, and so we change them. Politicians, corporate leaders, and billionaires want us to feel fear because when we’re full of fear, our brains switch into a mode of flight or freeze. We don’t ask questions. We don’t try to change the rules. We run or we hunker down.
I turn to a lengthy quote from an essay by the late, great Bernie DeKoven, a U.S. based playfulness guru, who wrote about playfulness as a political act in the early 2000s. Given our times, what he writes continues to ring true:
Playing and laughing together, especially when we play and laugh in public, for no reason, is a profound, and, oddly enough, political act.
Political, because when we play or dance or just laugh in public, people think there’s something wrong with us. It’s rude, they think. Childish. A disturbance of the peace.
Normally, they’d be right. Except now. Now, the peace has been deeply disturbed – everywhere, globally. And what those grown-ups are doing, playing, dancing, laughing in public is not an act of childish discourtesy, but a political act – a declaration of freedom, a demonstration that we are not terrorized, that terror has not won.
A Frisbee, in the hands of people in business dress in a public park, is a weapon against fear. A basketball dribbled along a downtown sidewalk, is a guided missile aimed at the heart of war. Playing with a yo-yo, a top, a kite, a loop of yarn in a game of cats’ cradle, all and each a victory against intimidation. Playing openly, in places of business, in places where we gather to eat or travel or wait, is a gift of hope, an invitation to sanity in a time when we are on the brink of global madness.*
Global madness. Yup. That about sums it up. Of course, play is not THE answer to all of the upheavals we’re experiencing; there is no silver bullet. But it is one tool we have in our toolbox to combat global madness. Let’s use it.
*DeKoven, B. (2013) A Playful Path, p. 160
