by Oppositional Conversations Editorial Board
Enough: An introduction
In a moment of now. Where we are caught between feeling ourselves to be sufficient even without the promise of a future and paralyzed by the overwhelm the world lays upon us day after day. In this moment between I am enough! and I've had enough!, we invite you to join us in expressing what needs saying—about: pandemic, climate cascade, moral panic (again), nuclear threat (again), collapsing futures, and war (again, again).
We imagine this issue to be a time capsule of sorts, a trace of this present instant, a scar.
In a world that might end tomorrow (or not), that has been upended (for many, many people), that rushes toward a return to a “normalcy” that never was (for most), we call on you to share how it feels to exist in this current moment of quandary and shifts.
The writings below emphasize elements of climate crisis, racial reckoning, and generational shifts, among others. However, more than as separate contributions we invite them to be read in unison as particular prisms into correlated realities. We have had enough in a myriad of ways, but enough will occur again and again, in different settings and post-pandemic societies. Perhaps Shakespeare had a similar insight centuries ago:
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
The readiness is all. To combine and intersect in solidarity. To know perhaps that it will both always and never be enough. To know that perhaps enough might be measured and tempered by our willingness to stand witness to the times we are living—to better bring what we choose to fruition for the generation to come.