The Exit Ramp

They're already with us.

This is written for the people who read those three parts and felt something uncomfortable and specific — not outrage, not sympathy. Something quieter. Something that sits in the chest differently than regular discomfort does.

You know who you are. This is for you.

Whatever you have done — paid for someone, used someone, looked the other way when you knew what you were looking at, told yourself it was transactional and therefore neutral, told yourself they wanted it, told yourself everyone does this — you are not past the point where it stops being yours to change.

That point exists. You don't want to find out where it is by arriving at it. The exit ramp is here. It gets harder to take the further down the road you go.

This is not a threat. This is just geography.

Every transaction leaves a record. Every device leaves a record. The record already exists. You did not do the thing and then have it disappear. You did the thing and it was written down by the infrastructure of modern life, which does not have a conscience but does have an excellent memory.

Specifically, in the current technological environment, engaging in this economy means:

The question is not whether evidence exists. The question is whether it will be assembled, and when, and what your life looks like on the day that happens.

Is it worth it? That is the only question. And it is genuinely yours to answer.

These are real options. Not all of them apply to every situation. None of them require you to be ready — just willing enough to take one step.

It is made up of people — people who are isolated, or broken in some specific way that nobody helped them fix, or addicted to something they started before they understood what it would cost them, or simply never learned that other people's pain is real in the same way their own is.

That doesn't make it acceptable. It makes it human, which is actually more complicated than making it evil, because evil you can just oppose. Human you have to actually work with.

The wave that is built on other people — on buying their time, their bodies, their compliance, their silence — that wave eventually breaks. It always does. The question is whether you're still on it when it does.

There is a different wave. It requires the same energy, the same showing up, the same early morning and the same drive and the same willingness to be somewhere specific on a schedule. It just doesn't destroy anyone on its way to shore.

That wave exists. It's available. The entry fee is a decision.

You are better than this.

I know that might be the first time anyone has said that to you without something attached to it — without the condition, without the performance required, without the fine print. So let me say it plain.

You are better than what you have been doing. Not because you're special. Because you're a person, and persons are capable of deciding who they are going to be, and that capacity doesn't expire. It is available to you right now, today, in whatever condition you are in.

If your mama never taught you that — or if she did and you stopped believing it somewhere along the way — well. Today is the day.

I'm not your mama. I've just been here long enough to know you need to hear this if you're listening. And the fact that you read all the way to the end of a four-part civic essay about human trafficking in El Paso County tells me something about you that you might not be saying out loud yet.

You're listening.

Good. That's the first thing.

Now make the call. Or make the decision. Or make the appointment. Or just put the phone down and don't pick up the one that leads where you know it leads.

One thing. One step. Today.

The rest follows from that.