Punctured
/Desperate times call for a desperate measure
By Don Varyu
Oct 2025
life can be punctured in so many ways. The death of a family member. A layoff at work. The medical emergency your insurance won’t cover. A betrayal. The end of romance.
Even if we escape this personally, we know how friends and family have suffered. We feel their despair…their regret…their yearning.
Someone close to me once said, “most people are like hollow rubber balls. You can poke them, and it will hurt for a minute, but when the jabbing stops, the ball snaps back to its original shape. I’m not like that—I’m like a Styrofoam ball. If you poke me, the jab stays and the pain never really goes away.”
I think of this because America now is that Styrofoam ball. The pain never seems to ease.
Subconsciously, we always assumed we had a healthy dose of immunity. After all, we had laws and rules and customs to protect us. And beyond that--most of all--we had each other.
Now—blinking with sudden consciousness—we realize that all those protections are gone.
What is lost was not planned only by Donald Trump. For decades, the far right has focused on the same target in their crosshairs. They have moved relentlessly to obliterate the U.S. Constitution.
oday people complain (reasonably) that the Democratic party doesn’t have a plan to counter the dictatorship of Trump. Some yell, “OK, why aren’t the Dems stopping all this—what do they want to accomplish?!!”
To answer, I urge Dems to stop thinking small; to take not just a big leap—but an enormous one.
Rewrite the U.S. Constitution.
Immediately announce formation of a “commission” with the incredible goal of starting from scratch. Trump has proved conclusively that the current rules of order are meaningless. Further amendments cannot come close to righting the wrongs he has committed.
Start over.
Of course, the first hint of this will elicit screams of mortal despair from the plutocrats who own America…as well as the Senators and Congresspeople they employ. And millions of citizens will protest, as well. Those will be led by Trump addicts who have fully bought into the propaganda aspect of Trump’s ‘patriotism’ which mandates believing everything is just fine.
The reaction from Dems should not be to recoil from the misguided outrage that will flame from Trumpies—but to embrace it. Because confronting their warped views of reality creates exactly the arguments you WANT to have in front of the country. All but the most hopeless dolts understand prices are climbing, medical insurance is disappearing and that Portland and Chicago are not being overrun with mythical Antifa armies.
To repeat—these are the arguments you WANT to have, because agreeing on facts opens the door to discussing potenial solutions.
And the process of rethinking what America should be all about will necessarily mean rewriting our foundational compromise—the Constitution.
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OK, I know this sounds pie-in-the-sky. So let’s get down to some specifics. We know there will be hundred of issues to debate; so let’s start with some essential questions:
What fundamental rights and freedoms apply to every citizen? And to every person living here without full citizenship?
How can the burden of taxation be fairly distributed among a population with vastly different wealths?
The federal debt is a ticking bomb. How do we start to dismantle the bomb?
Are we rich enough as a country to assure virtually everyone has enough food, a safe space to sleep, and adequate medical care—enough of all this to give everyone to build meaning and purpose into their lives?
How do we better fortify and enforce the balance of power among the three branches?
What mechanisms can we build to assure that law enforcement, at all levels, answers primarily to the people—and not an indivdual President, Governor, or Mayor?
Should a national popular vote replace the electoral college? Can laws be written to dismantle the current charade of Congressional redistricting?
How do we protect “public” interest and institutions from “private” ones?
How should we best protect children from the threats of automatic gunfire, scientific denial, and the predatory tentacles of social media?
ho is on this commission?
A combination of Democrats, Republicans, and independents—chosen by its funders and organizers, the Democratic party.
Representatives from business, academia, politics, unions and other worker and social service groups. Membership MUST include a substantial number of people beneath the national median in terms of both income and wealth.
Any concept of “diversity” will be defined in only one way: the majority of members will will NOT be recognized “experts” in Constitutional law. The will of the people must prevail. “Experts” will be involved as advisors, not leaders.
The majority of delegates should be young—under the age of 50. These Americans will be the first generation to test-drive with this new owner’s manual. They look through a different windshield than older people can.
Certainly, entire books could be written on how this process could work—and I hope they will be.
’ll insert my own metaphor. If America were a single house, think of it as punctured by a huge tree felled during a monumental storm. There is damage, to be sure. But depending on its severity, maybe we could get by with simple repairs. Or instead, maybe what’s required is a partial remodel. And if the house is so severely smashed, there may be no choice but to demolish and rebuild.
Unfortunately, option #3 is the only optioon we have. It’s inarguable that the very foundation of today’s America—our Constitution—has been punctured and disfigured beyond anything the Founding Fathers could ever have imagined.
I know this sounds ridiculously dramatic—maybe even crazy. But there’s no reason we can’t rebuild using the basic philosophical blueprint that guided the Founders in 1789. But it’s evident that the modern GOP has made their first version unworkable.
Despite what certain members of the political right would want you to believe, the original Constitution was never sacrosanct. The Constitutional Convention understood (and demostrated) that) just eight days after ratifying the original document itself. That’s when the authors passed into law a dozen different Amendments, which formed our Bill of Rights. Eight days later! They knew the original was imperfect.
Today there are 27 amendments. That means that, on average, better than once every ten years we’ve tried to patch the original document. But as many homeowners come to know, sometimes applying new patches is simply not enough to fix a severe structural problem. Majore repairs are the only option.
That’s what we need to acknowledge now.
If you’re still doubtful, let me give you one specific example to support my contention.
The state of Wyoming, with about 600,000 residents, is represented by two U.S. Senators and one member of Congress.
The District of Columbia, home to 700,000 Americans, gets no Senator, and one “delegate” to the U.S. House—who is seated, but never allowed to cast a vote. This is insane.
To repeat, simple repairs aren’t enough.
’ll close by returning to my original thought. Our Styrofoam ball is permanently—and existentially—deformed.
It’s never going to snap back into shape by itself. To believe otherwise is folly.
We need a whole new ball.
