Walking in non-essential shoes is one of the most painful treks one can try. Let’s take a hike.
Step. Early in the Corona scare, you wake up one day to find your business has been deemed non-essential for the good of the country. Fifteen years of scratching, clawing, and toil to gain control of your destiny and make a better life for your family. Then poof! most of that sweat equity evaporates in a fireball of fear.
To you and your family, your business isn’t simply essential, it’s existential. It is everything! The sum total of years of planning, hard work, sacrifice and pain, all which you were willing to suffer in order to achieve your life-long dream of owning your Small Business. Now, the future you worked for is facing extinction at the very moment you were about to reap the great rewards of your unrelenting efforts.
Step: Your doors are closed by draconian decree and dissent is ruthlessly punished. Your inventory is now a financial anchor dragging you toward an economic abyss. The money spent is wasted, at least until you reopen, if that’s ever granted by elected officials. Perishable goods rot like roadkill along with your hopes and dreams for the future. The media and government say, “we’re all in this together”, but it doesn’t seem like you’re in the same boat as everyone else. You’re definitely not sailing in the same ship as the political class.
Step: You have questions about the odd rules and regulations. Why is the virus less deadly in big business environments? Why is a 6.5-foot social distance 100% safe but a 5-foot gap cause for fines and recriminations? How do circles work when they themselves violate distance guidelines? How do masks stop viruses that are smaller than the mask’s holes? Why is five people safe but six cause for arrest? Why is the virus more dangerous at midnight than at 10:00 pm? Why are they using model projections for their decision data instead of actual, factual, numbers? It’s hard to understand.
Step: You’re screwed if this continues. You have growing debt but no revenue to cover it. You do what you’ve always done – whatever it takes to survive. You layoff employees, end business spending, slash personal spending, and dip into savings you had slated to pay for your 3-week 25th Wedding Anniversary celebration in Europe. And another dream is dead, killed by leaders who know nothing about the actual risk, and can’t know because no one knew anything about the novel coronavirus. You understand it’s ridiculous to base decisions on ignorance, but that’s Coronaville for you.
Step: Although reports of second-wave terrors are surging through the media, your Mayor, Governor or Premier graciously allows you to re-open – safely, of course, meaning you treat your long-term customers, friends really, with disdain by forcing them to line up in the elements for the “right” to enter your business. You hate it, but what can you do as Government can revoke your license at will. You’ve no choice if you want to save your business; you go into debt to restock and reopen your dream.
Step: You open your doors in anxious excitement, placing your hopes that the typically huge Christmas retail season can drive the business back into profitability. Customer traffic provides enough revenue to pay some mounting bills, but the restrictions make it impossible to do much else. You’re unable to significantly reduce your debts, rehire employees, or even pay yourself. Once the viral scare is over, you convince yourself, then you’ll be able to make up lost ground.
Step: The media is pushing panic again. You don’t get it. You know of no one who has caught the virus, let alone died from it. You do know that the virus has a taste for the sick and elderly, which means the young and healthy are very safe, making the decision to close schools rather strange. You remember the original scare claims were massive, hundreds of thousands were supposed to die. Not so. Why the focus on cases and not actual deaths?
Step: There it is! Shuttered again. That debt you incurred to restart is licking its chops. Your perishable goods are as useful as a steaming pile of moose dung, and just to rub your nose in it, the city will force you to pay them to come recycle it for you. Your Dream is now a dystopian, totalitarian nightmare. You can’t survive like this, your business, your dreams, and your future are dead.
Step: You see other business owners losing the fight as well. The calls from essential businesses to support Small Business is too little, too late. The damage is done and can’t be fixed. The virtue signalling is pure empty gesture, designed more as a marketing gimmick to convince people they care – while they support lockdowns that destroy their competitors. Virtue-free signalling at its finest.
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Step: You’re devastated, of course, but it isn’t in your nature to play the victim. You’ll figure something out. Then you receive emails and flyers from elected officials – the very people who purposely killed your business – wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas in these difficult times. No one can be THAT tone deaf, can they? No, which means they believe it’s best you be shut down.
However, you’ve learned much more about COVID-19’s oversold lethality. You know your Small Business isn’t a threat to public health. None are. But you are all being deliberately destroyed anyway.
What is really going on?
It’s simple. Governments are using illegitimate Fake News data to usurp power they have no right to. It’s completely corrupt, which is why these power-mad tyrants will never willingly give that power back.
Our collective ignorance of COVID-19 is so bad it spells the end of Democracy because our will, like Small Business, has been deemed non-essential.
The simple solution is to elect parties willing to defend liberty and freedom.
Like, um, wait! Hmmm.
Oh, oh.
Mark Gray hails from the Kirkland Lake, Ontario area and has spent over 30 years as an Analyst/Developer in Big IT, mostly in Calgary’s Oil-And-Gas Sector. Creator of an non-partisan, analytical methodology that seeks out and identifies Bias and Deceit embedded in weaponized information.
Walking in non-essential shoes is one of the most painful treks one can try. Let’s take a hike.
Step. Early in the Corona scare, you wake up one day to find your business has been deemed non-essential for the good of the country. Fifteen years of scratching, clawing, and toil to gain control of your destiny and make a better life for your family. Then poof! most of that sweat equity evaporates in a fireball of fear.
To you and your family, your business isn’t simply essential, it’s existential. It is everything! The sum total of years of planning, hard work, sacrifice and pain, all which you were willing to suffer in order to achieve your life-long dream of owning your Small Business. Now, the future you worked for is facing extinction at the very moment you were about to reap the great rewards of your unrelenting efforts. 
