Over the last several months, the United States has drifted into a slow-motion food emergency. Food banks across the country have reported surging demand. Volunteers in Seattle, once baking bread as a gesture of neighborliness, now find their loaves becoming a lifeline for families who have seen their grocery budgets collapse overnight. In Laredo, Texas, community food programs have become the sole buffer against hunger as federal aid stalls. In Illinois, community colleges are launching statewide food-drive competitions just to keep their students fed. On Native American lands, long-neglected communities are building their own food hubs from scratch because no one else will. And in California, the governor is deploying the National Guard to help food banks because millions are bracing for a sudden cut in their SNAP benefits following the government shutdown.
To state the obvious, this is not in any way a string of isolated events but a pattern that is replicating with the speed and devastation of a deadly virus. This is a dire warning.
The shutdown did not create food insecurity. It merely exposed it, accelerated it, and, with brutal and merciless clarity, demonstrated how easily the most basic human need can be held hostage to political gamesmanship.
Millions of children, elderly people, the sick, and working families woke up to the possibility that their food assistance might simply not arrive because political actors could not agree on a funding bill.
That a nation with America’s wealth and resources could allow this to happen is not just a policy failure. It is a moral failure. It is an obscenity.
And it is a civic failure. Because a government that feels no pressure from its citizens will always treat those citizens as afterthoughts.
Yet the deeper truth revealed by these stories is not only one of abandonment by the state; It is also one of resilience, agency, and people stepping in where the government has stepped back.
In Seattle, nearly 900 home bakers have produced over 200,000 loaves of nutritious bread because food banks can no longer meet demand. In the Southwest, Native communities are re-building food systems on their own land — reviving seeds, establishing training hubs, constructing local distribution networks — because generations of neglect have taught them that no one is coming to save them. In Illinois, the community college system mobilized across an entire state, turning students, faculty, and staff into a coordinated support network for those who live with hunger daily. Even the deployment of the National Guard in California — usually a symbol of crisis — shows how states, when pushed to the brink, can still act urgently to protect their people.
These efforts are inspiring, but they should not be romanticized. They exist because the system failed.
And that brings us to the central point: This crisis is a loud signal that Americans cannot afford to remain passive observers of their own democracy.
Food — the most elemental requirement for life — should never be a pawn in the power struggles of career politicians. When elected officials treat hunger as collateral damage in their partisan chess matches, it is proof that they feel insulated from accountability. Only one force can break that insulation: A population that refuses to disengage and decides to get up, roll up its sleeves, and take its own power back.
This does not mean embracing a libertarian fantasy of dismantling government and leaving every need to charity.
The news stories make that clear. A loaf of bread from a volunteer is an act of compassion. But this act cannot replace a national food system.
A tribal food hub is a powerful reclamation of agency. But it should not be necessary for survival in a country with the resources America has.
Even California’s mobilization of troops — extraordinary and admirable — is a reminder of what happens when federal systems collapse.
The answer is not less government. The answer is better government, and such a government comes from engaged citizens.
This moment calls for a new civic culture, one where people do not disappear after elections but stay present, active, and organized.
One where representatives are not given blank checks to legislate in the dark but are monitored bill by bill, decision by decision.
One where citizens build networks — local, digital, cross-community — to make sure their voices are not just heard occasionally but felt consistently.
Because if a government can allow millions to go hungry, then something fundamental has broken. And the only way to repair it is for the people themselves to take responsibility for steering the system back toward its purpose.
Not by replacing the state. Not by withdrawing from the public sphere. But by re-entering it with force, intention, and unity.
Let this be the wake-up call. Let this be the moment people decide that democracy was not meant to be and cannot be a spectator sport.
Children should never go hungry because politicians are playing games. Elders should never have to wait for the National Guard to deliver a box of canned goods. And families should never have to rely on the charity of strangers because their government could not keep its most basic promises.
And what is to be done at this moment of stark urgency?
Plenty.
Here’s a friendly challenge. Sit down, you, the reader, and ask yourself: ‘Am I doing all that is well within my means to ensure that people near me are not going hungry?’ You would be surprised that even in the wealthiest enclaves, people are going hungry. Locate your nearest affordable housing senior living community, for instance, and call them and ask: ‘Are there residents in your community who are going hungry?’ Chances are that the answer will be a hushed but urgent, ‘Yes!’
The boldest of all lines in the sand has been crossed. Now is the time for citizens to step forward, not to replace their government, but to finally take full and jealous ownership of it.Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.
