Yesterday our whole family went to see the Seattle Children’s Theater’s production of Robin Hood. It was a wonderfully entertaining re-telling of the Robin Hood tales put into a contemporary context by having the cast enter the theater through an outside door as if they were homeless people who stumbled in, looked surprised at the audience, and then began begging for money. Soon they shed their coats and hats transforming into victims of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham arguing about whether Robin Hood was real or not after which they seamlessly became the characters of the Robin Hood story. Neither Jung nor I missed the fact that the list of people who were responsible for the destitution in Nottingham began with “bankers;” the playwright clearly sought to highlight the parallels between the greed of Prince John and the greed of Wall Street.

I love the tale of Robin Hood; the Seattle Children’s Theater’s depiction of the Sheriff of Nottingham as a buffoon and Prince John as a despot who was only interested in bathing in gold made for a lot of fun and laughter. It’s easy to feel hopeful watching a hero like Robin Hood tricking and even stealing from the Sheriff while coming to the rescue of the victims of Prince John’s greed. Our whole family was laughing all the way through the show.

Today, though, I began to see some more sobering connections between the play and our current crises:

1. Like the audience at the Seattle Children’s Theater who were willing to suspend disbelief and imagine trees, castle walls, and arrows flying through the air, and who chose to believe that the small cast of four were actually a dozen different characters, in our financial and ecological crises, we have played the willing audience, suspending disbelief of ever-rising home values, never-ending oil supplies and promises of returns on investments which we may have suspected were too good to be true deep down inside. There is a time to dream and let our imaginations soar, and there is a time to look hard at the stories we are being told so that we may separate truth from fiction.

2. We love stories with victims and enemies. There is comfort in identifying with the victim, and to see their oppressors as greedy idiots who are living high on their (our) pain. I’ve seen this in a number of political cartoons from the past few months depicting the “1%” as haughty, greedy fat cats looking with scorn upon the Occupy Wall Street movement. I worry that such caricatures and victimizations may distract us from seeing the honest truth about our own lives. There is no doubt that there has been a lot of misconduct and not enough compassion in the financial sector. However, if we don’t hold ourselves accountable and responsible for our own piece of the picture, then we are giving up our power to make positive change in our lives. In addition, as long as we see the world in terms of “us and them” there will be injustice. We may not find the way out without accepting that the “other” is “us:” our fellow human beings trying to find happiness in this world, and that therefore there is no “other!”

3. Finally, even if we could run to Sherwood Forest and call for Robin Hood and his Merry Men to swing down from the trees, they couldn’t help us. The crises we find ourselves in today are ones we have created ourselves by distancing ourselves from the Earth, from each other, and from our souls. We each need to be our own Robin Hood, helping each other to expose the Prince John and Sheriff of Nottingham we each have within ourselves, taking back our gold and our ownership over our own lives, our communities, and our future.

In the spirit of yesterday’s post, “Sustainability is Security” as well as what I have written here, I invite you to watch this 5-minute video: “Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love”. One of the many points of the video which impressed me was that those who have “benefitted” from this inequality, may not be actually happy with the outcome, either. Their happiness has not increased with their profits and they as much help as we do to be freed of our country’s focus on GNP and to find the joy that comes from our soul’s song. May we all become our own Robin Hood and experience a more sustainable society within our lifetime.