A Poetic Tribute to Tina Peters this Thanksgiving

Guest post by Maureen Steele

There are lives that bend beneath the weight of suffering, and there are lives that stand — unbroken, unbowed — even when the world tries to crush them. Tina Peters is seventy-one years old. A Gold Star mother. A woman whose body has known illness and whose heart has already buried more grief than most of us could survive — her husband gone, her son gone, and now her freedom gone too.

This Thanksgiving, while we gather around warm tables under gentle light, Tina sits alone in a concrete cell, in solitary confinement — a grandmother locked in silence for refusing to betray her oath. For believing that public office is not a career but a covenant. For insisting that truth matters more than power.

And still, even there — surrounded by steel and fluorescent night and the cold indifference of a system built to break good people — she is thinking not of herself, but of others. She writes of women denied nutrition. Of inmates deprived of sleep under lights that never dim. She worries for them, advocates for them, sees their humanity when no institution will.

Even now, caged — she gives.

This is what courage looks like. Not hashtags. Not outrage typed into glowing screens while we sip lattes and schedule brunch. Not declarations of righteousness delivered from the comfort of freedom we have never had to defend.

Courage is a seventy-one-year-old woman who lost almost everything — and still refuses to surrender her soul.

Courage is saying no when the world demands yes.

It is choosing prison over betrayal.

It is honoring the Constitution when doing so comes with handcuffs.

Many Americans believe they have seen evidence that serious irregularities and unlawful actions infected elections in Colorado, Georgia, Arizona and beyond. Many believe that what Tina exposed deserved investigation, not punishment. And whether you share that belief or not, this remains undeniable: no democracy survives when whistleblowers are silenced and truth-seekers are caged. Justice cannot exist where questioning power becomes a crime.

If the people who raised alarms are imprisoned while those accused of wrongdoing remain untouched, then our Republic is already on its knees.

And yet — she stands.

Tina is paying the price for all of us who have not yet been asked to prove our principles with our freedom. None of us have been dragged before a judge and ordered: Lie, or go to prison. None of us have faced the test she has endured. We have been spared, while she has been chosen.

And maybe that is why she is where she is — because history has always used the brave to reveal the cowardice of the many.

So today, let us speak her name with reverence.

Let us pray for her release, but more importantly, let us pray for her example to transform us.

Because if every American carried even one fraction of Tina Peters’ resolve — if we had even one tenth of her spine — this nation would rise again like a great bell ringing through history. Darkness would tremble. Tyrants would fall. And America would remember who she is.

Free Tina Peters.

Not as a slogan — but as a promise that truth still has defenders, and that honor is not extinct.