Punctured
/Desperate times call for desperate measures
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 new 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 tear up the U.S. Constitution.
oday people complain (reasonably) that the Democratic party doesn’t have a plan to counter our dictatorship of Trump. “What do the Dems want to do??!!”
I urge them to stop thinking small; take a big plan—an enormous one--to America. Form a “commission” with the incredible goal of rewriting out Constitution. Of course, the first hint of this will elicit screams of mortal protest from the plutocrats who own America…the Senators and Congresspeople they employ…and tens of millions of citizens who have been duped into believing that everything is just fine.
Don’t recoil from this faux outrage—embrace it. This is the argument you WANT to have on behalf of American voters. By forcing a new vision of our foundation, voters will necessarily compare it to the one that exists now—and the comparison will be strongly favorable to a total rewrite.
There will be a hundred questions to debate. Here are some examples:
What fundamental rights and freedoms apply to every citizen? And to every person here without full citizenship?
How can the burden of taxation be fairly distributed among a population with vastly different wealths?
Are we rich enough to design a country where virtually everyone has food, a safe space to sleep, medical care, and the chance to find meaning and purpose in their lives?
With a second chance, how do we better fortify and enforce the balance of power among the three branches?
What mechanism can we build to assure that law enforcement, at all levels, answers primarily to the people, and not a single President, Governor, or Mayor?
What is the best way to truly empower American voters under the banner of “one man/one vote”? Does a national popular vote replace the Electoral College? Can law be written to dismantle the current charade of Congressional redistricting?
How do we protect “public” interest and institutions from “private” ones?
How can we 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 the funders and organizers, the Democratic party.
Representatives from business, academia, politics, unions and other worker and social service groups. Consequently, diversity comes into play by including but also moving decisively beyond the recognized experts in Constitutional law.
The majority of delegates should be young—at least under the age of 50. These Americans will be the first generation to test-drive with a 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. 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 take it all the way down to the studs—a full rehab.
Unfortunately for our national “house,” even this might not be enough. Because the very foundation of America—our Constitution—has been punctured and disfigured beyond anything the Founding Fathers could have imagined.
We need a full teardown. The Constitution needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
I know this sounds ridiculously dramatic—maybe even crazy. But there’s no reason we can’t rebuild it with a blueprint based on the same vision that went into that first design. We need a replacement.
Despite what certain members of the political right would want you to believe, the original Constitution was never sacrosanct—as the Founding Fathers understood and demonstrated. Just eight days after ratifying the Constitution itself, its 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, eventually applying new patches is simply not enough—sometimes you’re going to need a whole new roof.
Let me give one specific example to support my point. The state of Wyoming, with about 600,000 residents, is represented by two Senators and one member of Congress.
The District of Columbia, home to 700,000 people, gets no Senators, and one “delegate” to the U.S. House—who isn’t even allowed to vote.
Simple repairs aren’t enough.
’ll close by returning to my original thought. Our Styrofoam ball is permanently—and existentially—punctured.
It’s never going to snap back in shape by itself. We need a new ball.
