Dolly Parton helped fund a Covid vaccine. This isn't the first time she's saved us

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/01/dolly-parton-fund-covid-vaccine

Jessa Crispin

Tue 1 Dec 2020 06.32 EST

In the past month, Dolly Parton has saved us both from the pandemic and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, if you’ve been paying attention. Dolly Parton has been saving us her entire career.

Back in April – while the Trump administration was still downplaying the risks of the coronavirus, and churches and religious organizations were lobbying for the right to hold super-spreader events and infect their congregations, and terrible people were stockpiling masks and hand sanitizer in the hopes of profiting from mass death – the singer made a $1m donation to Vanderbilt University medical center. The donation, just one of a few such donations she’s made to Vanderbilt over the years, was used to fund research for the Moderna vaccine, currently testing at 94.5% effective. (Why it is still being called the Moderna vaccine and not The Dolly I do not understand.)

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She grew up in the kind of material deprivation that often creates a kind of cruel selfishness, or a lifelong vulnerability, but occasionally crystallizes into moral clarity. What she lived without – and she was one of 12 children born to illiterate parents who lived in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, so she lived without a lot – seems to have guided her to the decision that no one else should have to.

So she set up the Imagination Library, a charity that gives free books to children all over the world. When wildfires tore through Tennessee in 2016, she set up a fund to give families who lost their homes $1,000 a month to help them get back on their feet. The charity, called My People, still gives grants and donations to firefighters and rebuilding efforts. She risked her career to support HIV/Aids groups when it was still taboo in country music, and she gives away a ton of money to healthcare facilities and organizations.

Dolly is someone who understands that money is something you do rather than something you have, an insight our politicians and leaders somehow keep missing. People use money to create division, to hurt and destroy. They amass it and sit on it and want to be applauded for it. Dolly uses it to construct the kind of world I bet she wishes she had been born into.