what is 'enough' when you're working for justice?
28 Jan 2024this feels a bit like an unthinkable thought but i’m gonna think it out loud and hope to not get destroyed.
thus far, my experience of social movement in the US is that we fall victim to one of the root dynamics of capitalism: a weak relationship with the concept of enough.
this feels unthinkable (like, as in, heretical) because we are living in a world that includes things like sexual violence, genocide, war, mass collective trauma, patriarchy, and on and on… and for those of us who have seen clearly that the world includes those things, doesn’t have to include those things, and are working towards making the world not have those things, the work is clear. and any time that we are not there, it’s clear that there is more work to do. and if you’re not doing the work to get us there, if you’re not doing everything in your power to get us there, there is a quiet (but sometimes loud and explicit) belief that you’re not committed to everyone suffering from all of these fucked up systems we’re in. this starts external (and can often look like burnout) and can end up internal (because we internalize the cultural waters we swim in).
the trouble is that the work is HUGE. it took centuries for some of these systems to get in place. and some of us have taken it upon our selves to end these multi-generational systems “in our lifetime(s)” like… there are multiple live campaigns right now using that phrase as a campaign title or rallying cry.
the trouble with this belief, in my opinion, is that it is secretly, and maybe ironically, self-centered and self-involved. it essentially says “i think that me and my peers can single-handedly end this system that was built over hundreds of years by thousands if not hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals.”
and like… to be clear, i am VERY for these oppressive systems ending. but i fear that our lack of relationship with enough keeps up buried, drowning in the work to the detriment of the work itself.
on a recent episode of how to survive the end of the world, Sepideh Moafi said “if you want to be involved with something, if want to talk about something for longtime, you cannot talk about it all the time.”
me and dave jenkins have talked about this multiple times in our friend calls. we so rarely hear the concept of enough talked about in our circles of folks doing justice work, and maybe especially those of us working in the npic. to be clear, it does happen. but it’s just so rare compared to the collective energy of “we haven’t done enough.” and when we don’t have a clear idea of what enough is, it is too, too easy to just do more.
so… what is enough in y/our work? what does it look like to put as much energy as you have towards something and not more? what goals can i/you/we set and then stick to them so that we don’t destroy ourselves in the process of trying to stop destruction? (tbh, even now, some part of me is saying “but isn’t that what we have to do to stop systems of destruction? don’t we have to throw ourselves as human wrenches in the machinery of oppression to try and gum up the works?” i can hear the critical voices of others reading this and saying “yea, that sounds like words spoken from privilege and selling out.”) and maybe that’s true.
but i do think that maybe there’s another way to do this thing. and maybe we won’t end the systems in our lifetimes. but it took them longer than our lifetimes to get here and maybe it’s ok to aim for survival and sustainability and a multi-generational approach to systems change. maybe it’s ok to be explicit and conscious about what’s enough and then stop there. even if it doesn’t fix the problem tomorrow.
ps - this is not a new thought and i am certainly not the other person saying things along these lines. but i am definitely wanting to get my thoughts out about this because it just feels too insidious to not.
words / writing / post-processing
676w / 21min / 3min