Rebuilding America, Brick By Brick

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

I hope I’m not the first one to break the news to you.

She was clearly a unique person, full of joy and love. She was an incredibly talented songwriter. I’m sure everybody knows her story by now.

She left her hometown in Tennessee at 18 and moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. There are probably ten thousand similar stories of youngsters who dream of stardom, move to Nashville, and then fail. Dolly Parton did not fail.

She had a string of country music hits, then crossed over to the pop charts in the early 1980s. She became a movie actor. She made television appearances. She built Dollywood, a country-western-themed park, to give back to her community. She didn’t build it in the big cities of Nashville or Memphis; instead, she built it in Pigeon Forge.

Her generosity seemed to know no bounds. She seemed to have a genuine love for humanity. Her Imagination Library has donated over 300 million books to underprivileged children. I am not a country music fan, but I am a big fan of Dolly Parton. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all acted a little bit more like Dolly Parton and a lot less like Donald Trump?

Rebuilding Our Democracy

I’m going to assume that we want to keep our Constitution; if so, it is time to stand up and support it.

The Constitution needs teeth. To start with, are we really going to embrace the idea that all men and women are created equal? This is our foundation. This means no more gerrymandering. This means that everyone’s vote counts. This means it needs to be easier to vote than it is to buy a gun or a beer throughout the United States. We need federal legislation that specifically mandates how we draw voting districts throughout the United States. We cannot leave this to the states. They have proven that they should not have that responsibility. This will likely require a constitutional amendment.

There should be 7 to 14 days of early voting. Election days should be on weekends, or Election Day should be a national holiday so most Americans can get the day off. This should make voting easier. No one should have to stand in line for more than 15 minutes to vote. Right?

We can figure out how many voting machines a district needs and make that happen. (Tarrant County has just decreased the number of voting machines, therefore making it harder to vote, and completely removed all polling places at the University of Texas in Arlington, which has tens of thousands of students. This is wrong and should never be allowed to happen!)

There should be criminal penalties for making Americans stand in line for hours in order to vote. That’s nuts! Every state and every district should have easy mail-in voting.

We need to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. All women should have bodily autonomy. This is a basic right.

We, as voters, have an obligation and a responsibility to do better. We have newspapers, magazines, and the Internet to educate ourselves, yet too often we walk into a voting booth with no idea whom we’re voting for. We don’t know who’s on the ballot. We tell ourselves everybody they are all the same, then close our eyes, make a wish, and hope we voted for the right person.

This is how people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marsha Blackburn, and Sarah Palin got elected. And no, incompetence isn’t limited to just women. Donald Trump should have never been elected. He was completely unqualified by whatever metric you want to use. George Santos, a Representative from New York, should never have been elected to Congress. He was nothing but a con man. They kicked him out of Congress and sent him to jail.

As voters, we need to educate ourselves about the issues and the people running for office. We should not look for the perfect candidate; instead, we should look for the candidate who most closely matches our values. Then we need to walk into the voting booth and vote for someone with compassion, someone with understanding, and someone who can learn on the job. We must reject everyone who thinks they have all the answers (Donald Trump), because no one does.

We need to rebuild our institutions. This starts with the Supreme Court. We need to add seats to the Supreme Court to dilute the nonsense that the six conservative Supreme Court members continue to support.

The current Supreme Court seems to be playing a game with the American people. They are delaying decisions and allowing Donald Trump to continue to plow through his agenda, and then later they will tell us whether it’s unconstitutional or not. This is ridiculous. The best example is that they allowed him to tear down the East Wing, and now they’re allowing him to build the ballroom, telling the plaintiffs they don’t have standing because the ballroom hasn’t been built yet.

This is absolute nonsense! We need a Supreme Court that will stand up for the Constitution and the American people. This Supreme Court is doing neither.

In addition to the Supreme Court, we need to fix the Centers for Disease Control. Vaccines are safe and very effective. We need to eliminate measles again.

We need to rebuild public trust in our institutions. This means that we MUST hold wrongdoers accountable. Americans who intentionally lie and deceive the American public need to be held accountable. We should start with RFK, Jr.

We have to get social media under control. Hate speech must be outlawed.

We need to rebuild our military. We have broken a proud institution with terrible leadership. Hell, the USS Abraham Lincoln, with its terrible conditions, should be a lesson to all of us. The ship had no safe harbor to resupply. Why? Because Iran had bombed our resupply base in the region. This was completely predictable. We are now trying to use a base in Singapore to resupply our ships in the Persian Gulf. That is a 4,000-mile supply line. Four thousand miles!

Secretary of Defense Hegseth has decimated our military leadership. It will take years to rebuild our military. I’m not talking about restocking weapons. I’m talking about getting 3- and 4-star generals who understand the world and our military.

ICE needs to be dismantled. Currently, they are acting as the lawless branch of the Trump administration, like Brownshirts in Nazi Germany. ICE agents who shot and killed Americans need to be put on trial, and if convicted, they should spend a long time in jail. The leaders of ICE, those who told the agents to break the law, to bend the law, to ignore the law, also need to be put on trial. If convicted, they should also spend decades behind bars. This is about breaking up the cult and reinforcing the rule of law.

We need to roll up our sleeves and fix our education system. We need to increase teachers’ pay. We need to rebuild our schools. We need to teach social studies. We need to teach civics. We need to introduce music and art back into the schools. We need to teach American history. This means teaching the good and the bad. From the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement, from the Trail of Tears to the American Expansion in the West, American history needs to be more comprehensive.

We need to fund our schools. Teachers shouldn’t have to pass the hat to get basic classroom supplies. As a matter of fact, why are we just doing the basics? Shouldn’t our kids have a first-class education? This means we shouldn’t try to save money on supplies and books for our kids. We need to give our children the textbooks that they need. Those books should be theirs so they can use them as references later.

We need to make state universities $500 to $1,000 a semester, or less. In fact, the Constitution of the State of North Carolina, Article IX, Section 9, Benefits of public institutions of higher education, requires that “The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.”

The federal government needs to subsidize tuition at all colleges and universities: benefits must go to students, not institutions or million-dollar administrator salaries. This places higher education within everyone’s grasp. We need to eliminate these for-profit schools that do little more than empty hardworking Americans’ bank accounts.

We have to fix the American press. We want a free press, a press not beholden to any one party or, more importantly, any one class. We need to pass legislation so that no major media outlet is owned by a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate or some billionaire. News outlets need to be independent. They should be not-for-profit. Any media outlet that intentionally lies (proven in a court of law) to the American people should lose its FCC license as well as its right to appear on cable or the Internet.

This is about rebuilding our society. We all have a shared responsibility. This is about living up to our Declaration of Independence and what, in the Preamble to the Constitution, we said we wanted: a more perfect union.

I don’t want to recreate something from the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, I want to create something new. I want to create a society that works for all Americans. I want to make life better for the rich and the poor. This means standing up for the poor. This means that no American goes hungry. This means universal healthcare so everybody’s covered and nobody goes bankrupt from a medical bill.

We need to love each other. This single act will point us in the right direction. We need to follow Dolly’s example.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.