I Don’t Know Why, But This Was It.

I’ve had enough — of all of it. It’s time to build a fundamentally different system, right now.

Photo by Alan Tang on Unsplash

We’ve known this day was coming for over a month, and we’ve known it was likely for years preceding. Yet, sitting on the ledge from my relative safety in Vermont, overlooking of a massive wave of human rights violations for millions of vulnerable women across my country, one among so many such waves drowning so many people, I’ve arrived at a special sort of psycho-spiritual vantage point.

Enough.

I’ve said it before, then mostly about the economy: that we’ve done enough hustling, enough striving, enough competing, enough producing. We’ve had enough. We have enough. We are enough.

I’ve said it before, about wanting to let go the rip cord of this economic and political system that hangs us like a noose with our feet touching ground just enough to survive.

Today, the level of enough-ness runs deeper. I’ve had enough of fear. I am stepping over this ledge to wherever else is out there, because I cannot stomach participating in a world so upside-down and backwards any longer. I want nothing to do with any of this. I want no glittering career, no fancy house, no polished résumé. I want no more accolades or honors. I seek no power but the power of autonomy within a non-hierarchical community that understands its interdependence.

I don’t want to pay rent, buy groceries, commute, stay on the sidewalk, lower my voice or be civil. I don’t want to vote my way out of this. I just want out, and I want it now.

I’ve had enough of rage too. I’ve had enough of despair. I’ve had enough of the taste of my own anxiety in the face of insurmountable cruelty wielding undue power. If I’m not in prison or executed by the time I’m fifty, I must not be working hard enough.

Before then, though, I want to build.

I want to experiment with every tunnel out of this system. I want to dig more. I want to understand everyone who’s tried, where they’ve failed and what chances we have now of succeeding from the lessons they left behind.

I want to prove that food and shelter do not need to be commodities. I want to…