A digression from my series of posts on revisiting Carl Jung, which begins here.
Posted October 17, 2025, updated October 21st.
What’s up with all the inflatable frogs in Portland? Just a bit of silliness? Federal troops went there looking for trouble, and I was pretty worried somebody would give the president a photo op. Would protesters resort to violence, or would they do the energy-draining “everybody sit down in the street” nonviolence? Those were the two choices. Violent or nonviolent. A binary. I was absolutely not expecting amphibians. And yet, here we are.
The frog is a trickster figure. Tricksters, found in every culture everywhere, transgress social norms, cross boundaries, and pass effortlessly from one realm to another. They’re archetypes, part of our human psyche. Raven, Anansi, Loki, Bugs Bunny — all Tricksters. Tricksters create an opening, a possibility, the freedom to choose.
What borders do the inflatable frogs cross? They violate stereotypes of protestors. They cross the human/animal divide, and also the adult/child divide. When ICE agents are zip-typing children and separating them from their families, they are destroying childhood.
The Trickster is also a part of the Shadow. Although the Shadow is generally understood as “evil” or “inferior,” it instead refers to all the parts of the psyche that the conscious mind represses. It’s everything that we tried not to know about ourselves. For anyone working hard on a fascist persona, like the ICE agents, a symbol of childhood and silliness is exactly that. To misquote a favorite radio show of mine, “Who knows what silliness lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows!”
Maybe I’ll go to the No Kings March tomorrow dressed as the TARDIS. She’s a trickster too, passing through realms, transgressing time. Before the frogs happened, I wouldn’t have considered this costume an option. But a door was opened. A possibility created. We can demonstrate with our whole selves.
Coincidentally, or prophetically, I played with frogs at the 2017 Womxn’s March. After we got tired of marching, our family headed off to a cafe, where a group had left behind a bunch of cards, just the right size to make paper frogs, which we promptly did. So the featured image for this post reads, “Socialism or barbarism OR FROGS!”
I choose frogs.
P.S. from October 21st, 2025. Seven million people protesting, and not a single one of them arrested. Why?
Was it the frogs?
Kristin Ann King 