Nothing we have in this world has ever been handed down by those in power.
Every right we stand on today was not handed down to us—it was demanded. Freedom was fought for first in the fields, then the streets, then in jail cells, and in the courts. From the beginning, this country was built for the benefit of rich white landowners.
Every ounce of freedom the rest of us have ever celebrated was won through blood and sweat, through tears and sacrifice, through bodies broken and hung from trees, through miners’ families burned alive at Ludlow, through workers shot in the back at Haymarket and Flint, through suffragists beaten and force-fed in prison cells, through marchers on bridges, and organizers gunned down in their own driveways.
Our brothers and sisters—those who came before us—refused to stop, refused to bow, refused to wait—and they did not quit until they had torn freedom from the hands that tried to deny it.
In the United States, emancipation didn’t come because Lincoln signed a piece of paper. It came because enslaved people freed themselves: resisted, escaped, and fought until the system broke.
Women’s suffrage wasn’t granted by benevolent leaders—it was won by women chaining themselves to fences, marching, starving themselves in prison, and refusing to be silent for nearly 100 years until the vote could not be denied.
Black women like Sojourner Truth fought beside our white ancestors for women’s rights, but they left our black sisters behind. When the 19th Amendment was finally signed giving women the right to vote, our black sisters (and brothers) wouldn’t find their semblance of equality (their right to vote without discrimination) until the Civil Rights movement nearly 50 years later.
The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t gifted by politicians—it was forced by ordinary people sitting at lunch counters, riding buses, marching across bridges, facing dogs and fire hoses, and demanding the world change.
Even Roe v. Wade was built on decades of women having each other’s backs and supporting clandestine clinics and underground community care—known as the Jane Underground Collective—until the courts had no choice but to recognize what these women had already made real.
And this isn’t just an American story. Across the globe, the same truth repeats:
- India’s Independence Movement (1947): Gandhi, Nehru, and millions of ordinary Indians—boycotts, salt marches, mass civil disobedience. Britain didn’t hand over independence; India took it through relentless self-governance.
- Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa (1948–1994): From Soweto uprisings to the ANC underground, to mass labor strikes—apartheid ended because people refused to comply with its legitimacy any longer.
- Solidarity Movement in Poland (1980s): Workers organized independent unions and strikes under a communism gone wrong one-party dictatorship. The movement spread until it cracked the Soviet bloc itself.
- Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico (1994-): Indigenous communities declared autonomy from the Mexican state, building their own councils, schools, and health systems. They still govern themselves today outside state control.
- Rojava (Northern Syria, 2010s): Kurdish communities built a system of “democratic confederalism”—direct democracy councils, gender equality, local autonomy—while fighting off ISIS and resisting authoritarian states around them.
These are but a few examples of many. And this is where we—the United States of America—are right now. Standing on the precipice.
Our brothers and sisters are being kidnapped off the streets by masked cowards with an inferiority complex and locked away in modern day concentration camps or being deported to dangerous foreign prisons. Bodies shackled at the hands and feet have washed up on beaches around the world—evidence we’re told to ignore or explain away.
We have sisters being denied healthcare for miscarriages and failed pregnancies and dying as a result. Ten-year-old girls are raped and forced into motherhood by men who know they are not man enough. We also have girls as young as 10 who have been married off to men not worthy of being called men; child marriage laws that are still allowed in far too many states.
We have a sitting president who was found guilty of sexual assault and then defamation against his victim, accused and his actions outlined in legal testimony of raping 12- and 13- year old little girls (allegations later withdrawn by the victim after threats to her life), and caught paying off a sex worker with campaign funds.
And through it all, we maintain a system of legalized slavery supported by the 13th Amendment in our overcrowded, for-profit prisons.
This is but a glimpse of the United States of America in 2025. Freedom? For whom, exactly?
Representative democracy has failed us.
But it’s working exactly as designed. A system where wealth buys power, where corporations write the laws, and where politicians—on both sides—auction off your future like a commodity on Wall Street.
It is the flag-wrapped myth of democracy.
And it’s happening because 54% of our adult population reads below a 6th-grade level. Of that number, 21% are functionally illiterate and unable to complete basic reading tasks.
About 33% of U.S. adults can read between a 7th–12th grade level and are able to manage everyday texts, but often struggle with complexity and abstraction.
That leaves just 13% of us where the whole of society should be if we actually want to be free.
The wealthiest nation in the world has only 13% of its population capable of thinking beyond a mid-teenage comprehension level, with the majority trapped at the level of 13-year-olds or younger. Products of a system that was never designed to make them free thinkers and innovators.
So where does that leave critical thinking? And how easy does it make it to fool people into believing anything, if they can’t even read or reason their way through it?
If only 13% of our adult population are capable of critically analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing complex information, it leaves us in the dark standing on a cliff.
To paraphrase three men often held up by those in power—Jefferson, Douglass, and Dewey (and yes, deeply flawed men in their own right):
a democracy cannot survive when the majority cannot critically read the contracts, ballots, or laws they’re forced to live under.
And that’s why the collapse has felt so sudden. The rot has been happening for decades, maybe even centuries, but social media poured gasoline on a fire already burning. When over half the country can’t read past a sixth-grade level or too far above it, it doesn’t take much to flood their feeds with lies before they begin to call it truth.
“Do your research” has become a rallying cry that reveals the very ignorance it pretends to defy. Most people cannot dig past a headline. They cannot parse the legalese. They cannot trace a source back to where it came from. They cannot even properly vet sources. Thus, the echo chamber replaces thought. The scroll replaces study. And the mob becomes easier to control than ever before. And ChatGPT is wrong—a lot—but far too many are depending on it as a source of absolute truth.
We are told we are the luckiest citizens in the world; that we are free and everyone wants to be like us. But the truth is, no one wants to be like us. We are treated like products on a shelf—packaged, priced, and sold off to the highest bidder. The rest of the world sees this. Only we don’t.
Our votes are courted every few years fueled by lies and propaganda.
Our labor is stripped for profit.
Our lives are collateral in someone else’s empire.
This system cannot be reformed.
It was never built to serve us. It was built to contain us.
And here we are, again, standing at the same precipice where every generation before us has stood—that razor-thin line where obedience means extinction, and defiance means survival.
Enslaved people knew it.
The suffragists knew it.
The marchers at Selma knew it.
The workers who shut down mines and factories knew it.
Every single time, people took power into their own hands before the system ever gave an inch.
And now it’s our turn.
That’s where we are now. We are not asking. We are not begging. We are not waiting for permission. We are building the alternative—here, where we are. Where you are. One person at a time, coming together as a whole. Not another bastion of corruption. But a democracy that cannot be sold, bought, or blackmailed into submission.
History doesn’t lie, my friends. Power only shifts when people stop pleading to be governed and act to take it back, without permission. Are you ready?
