Made for America: Liberty Poised and For All
Article #1 – May 28, 2025
Wrought by Christopher J. Perger, Volunteer Steward and Co-Founder of Liberty Shore
Are you tired? Not just the garden-variety fatigue, but the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from watching the same cynical circus play out—government, politicians, pundits, market meltdowns, a nation demoralized by childishness on the grandest stage?
Good. That exhaustion is holy. It’s the last honest pulse in a country running on nostalgia and reruns—where even our outrage feels recycled.
Here’s the unvarnished truth: we’re not just tired; we’re finally clear-eyed. The distractions, the false idols, the rage-click junk food—they’ve all done their job, driving us to the brink until we had no choice but to stare into the rot beneath the floorboards of this American experiment.
Let’s not kid ourselves: none of today’s crises are new. Racism, gender violence, a tax code built for robber barons, public schools bled dry, a justice system warped by inertia, voters asleep at the wheel—these aren’t bugs. They’re features, hardwired from the beginning and updated with every generation…
We didn’t invent the crisis; we just ran out of places to hide from it. We’ve watched too many “isolated incidents”—school shootings, armored raids, families torn apart at the border. And the worst part? We watched fellow Americans tune in for the spectacle, over and over. Now we’ve seen the machinery—ugly, oily, grinding—and realized we’d mistaken noise for progress. We hoped these things would fade, like the offensive jokes your grandfather told at Thanksgiving.
They didn’t fade.
They grew fangs under an alluring smile.
So here we are: naked truth, center stage, no intermission. That matters—not for poetry’s sake, but for survival’s. For the first time in living memory, we’re awake. Every myth we fed ourselves—post-racial progress, American exceptionalism, technocratic neutrality—has crumbled under the weight of its own cowardice.
The veil has dropped. And, in a grotesque twist, we have Donald J. Trump to thank—not as a visionary, but as a symptom. A mirror. A walking, shouting, tweeting diagnosis of a country with emotional gonorrhea. Like any honest STD, it leaves us with clarity—and a burning regret.
But this is not an excuse for the predators—the capitalists who write inequitable laws, the politicians cashing checks on human misery, the propagandists feeding off moral collapse. No, we indict them—publicly, relentlessly, and without regret—so their names are dragged into daylight with a bold, italicized, and underlined font. And, in return, we hold ourselves accountable for the vacuum that has allowed them to become the noxious entities we see today.
Now, please read this carefully:
WE ALLOWED APATHY TO BECOME A RELIGION.
We confused cynicism for wisdom. We surrendered our democratic tools like tickets for a show we never intended to watch. But now the show’s over. The time has come to rebuild the theater, with the knowledge that we were never as powerless as we believed.
Here’s the revelation that should rattle every corrupt official from city hall to Capitol Hill: the American people already possess an arsenal of legal and constitutional weapons—yet most of us haven’t even taken off the safety, let alone fired a single round. These are the true instruments of liberty—not assault rifles, but petitions, jury boxes, ballots, and public forums. A rifle might protect your home; these tools protect your democracy.
We’ve been conned into thinking our only power is pulling a lever every couple of years. That’s the biggest scam in political history. The system isn’t just rigged—it’s rigged to make us forget we hold the keys to unrigging it.
Consider the ballot initiative: a weapon of mass democracy, hiding in plain sight in 26 states. Citizens can bypass bought-and-paid-for legislatures, crafting laws directly through petitions and popular vote. Legal cannabis in California. Expanded voting rights in Massachusetts. Redistricting reform in Colorado. These weren’t gifts from politicians—they were seizures of power by citizens who refused to wait for permission.
Then there’s the recall election—democracy’s nuclear option. Wisconsin challenged Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting in 2012. California ejected Governor Gray Davis in 2003. The mere threat of recall disciplines officials who might otherwise treat their offices as personal fiefdoms. Yet how many Americans even know this tool exists?
The grand jury system: our most overlooked civic superpower. Every day, ordinary citizens sit behind closed doors with the authority to halt prosecutions, demand investigations, and expose misconduct. These aren’t ceremonial roles—they’re instruments of civilian oversight, built into the system to check the powerful. But they only work if citizens show up, know their rights, and act.
The Freedom of Information Act: an underused weapon against government secrecy. Any American can demand federal documents, emails, contracts, and records—forcing transparency by law. Journalists use FOIA to expose Pentagon waste and EPA cover-ups, but citizens rarely wield it for local accountability.
Why aren’t we flooding city councils with FOIA requests about development deals? Why aren’t we demanding to see school board communications with private contractors?
The information is there, protected by law, waiting for us to claim it.
Sunshine Laws require government meetings to be public. Yet how many citizens attend city council meetings, school board hearings, or planning commissions? These are the rooms where real power operates—where zoning, budgets, and policies are decided. Backroom deals happen because we’ve abandoned the front rooms where they should be stopped.
Civilian review boards for police oversight: community power in its rawest form. Citizens can investigate police conduct, review body camera footage, subpoena records, recommend discipline. These boards can pierce the blue wall of silence—but only if residents know how to strengthen them or demand their creation.
We’ve argued ourselves hoarse. Meme wars, comment-section crusades, righteous clapbacks with zero follow-through. We’ve begun wallowing in our exhaustion, allowing disagreement to become either entertainment or intolerable. But politics is not entertainment, nor is it inherently a bad thing.
Politics is infrastructure. Not just speeches and scandals—but roads, hospitals, water, air. It’s who eats and who doesn’t. Who lives near a toxic dump and who gets bottled spring water delivered. Anyone who tells you politics doesn’t matter is either very rich, very deluded, or already spiritually flatlined.
That’s why some nations have universal healthcare and others have empty pantries and armed guards. The American myth says we deserve better. The American reality says we only get what we fight for—and what we’re willing to maintain.
The machinery of power was never designed to exclude us—it was designed to exhaust us into excluding ourselves. Every time we throw up our hands and declare the system broken beyond repair, we’re doing exactly what those in power need us to do: stepping aside. But the system isn’t broken for everyone. It works perfectly for those who show up, who treat governance like the serious business it is—not a spectator sport.
Still, there is hope.
Not the soft, gauzy hope of slogans, but the sharp-edged, trench-digging hope that shows up ready to build. The kind that sees through the spectacle and still believes in community, mutual protection, real solutions.
It’s time to stop debating for points and start organizing like we’re running out of time, because we are.
Most of us are here not because we loved politics, but because politics happened to us. It showed up in hospital bills, school funding gaps, protest chants, and funerals that never should have happened. We didn’t ask for it. But we’re here now. And if you’re reading this, you’ve felt that tectonic shift. That awakening that isn’t about partisanship, but about purpose.
Remember the names that reached into our collective chest—Betty White, George Floyd, Robin Williams, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman, Chris Farley. Their losses hit like cultural lightning. These weren’t just headlines; they were gut-checks. Not political, but personal. They reminded us of what we’ve truly lost—not just people, but meaning. That joy, fairness, and human dignity aren’t partisan—they’re human.
Yet somehow, we let healthcare, safety, belonging, and breathable air become battlegrounds instead of the basic agreements they always should have been. These aren’t Democratic values, nor are they Republican.
They’re survival values.
And we miss them like we miss the dead.
So here’s the ask: zoom out. Forget the cable news angles, the hashtags, the rage industrial complex. Ask yourself—not what side you’re on, but what kind of country you want your grandchildren to inherit, and not in the abstract.
Tangibly. Block by block. School by school. Law by law. Can you imagine it?
If so, let’s compare notes and get to work.
Not sure about every detail? Join the club—then take notes, share later, and still, let’s get to it.
#libertyshore
Made for America: Liberty Poised and for All
Article #1 – June 2nd, 2025
Wrought by
Christopher J. Perger
Volunteer Steward, Founder
of
Liberty Shore