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HANGING TOGETHER

Read these words from the Declaration of Independence again; maybe you haven’t read them since your school years: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

This condition, as stated in those famous words, is not one of real life.  It is one to be sought and strived for through all ages, endlessly, never to be totally achieved, of course.  All men and women are not created equal unless you might want to consider the very few first seconds after birth, and even then, the gifts genetically and God-given, are not distributed equally.  We find ourselves at a crossroads today, this very day that you read this, and for many more to follow.  The nation is in shock and continues on as if no “iceberg” has been struck, waiting day after day, night after night, for damage reports to give everyone, or anyone, a hopeful report, not just about the Coronavirus, but about the economic nightmare that lays just ahead, like the freezing water did that night back in 1911 when the Titanic ran into its little problem.

Will the USA be able to weather this hit, and come back like it was before?  Will the population endure the loss of constitutional rights (even now they are turning away people from New York and Louisiana who are trying to drive into Florida, and all those attempting to get to the Keys)?  In Illinois police are stopping travelers to find out where they are going, with the possibility of writing a five-hundred-dollar ticket to those who are not going to or from an approved “essential” place of business.  There is talk of using cell phone data location detection devices to check and make sure the officers stopping travelers are getting the truth. What of all the salespeople who have no clients to service or prospects to sell?  What of the restaurant industry, simply driven to its very knees, not to mention all the small businesses that have dotted the streets and highways across this country from one end to the other?  Will it all roll back and be like before.

A very prominent Lake Geneva businessman, who’s been in town for years, thinks that the city will lose half of its businesses, and they will never be back.  Already, three businesses are gone with two more are preparing to move out.  Americans are to be receiving checks from the Federal Government to help.  It is presumed that everyone in the country can be contacted or know how to apply.  That is an airy assumption if there ever was one, and how about qualifying for those small business loans?  Right now that’s a complex nightmare of qualification detail.  There is good news from the brutal strike of America’s reaction to the spread of this virus, and those things are written further down in this issue.

Lake Geneva waits, holding tight and holding on,  hopefully, like the rest of the nation.  The fear of getting the virus, the fear of not being able to go anywhere at all, the fear of running out of money, and the fear that the safety everyone presumed was a fundamental part of being an American citizen is not really there at all anymore.  We must hang together as we are pushed apart.  We must turn negative depression into a positive obsession.  People are, by and large, being nicer to one another in general.  Those people who are out on the streets and in the parks and even still along the shore of Geneva Lake.  We pass one another, while still being allowed to be out here, ten to twenty feet apart, but waving and smiling at one another like never before.

Hanging together as we are pushed apart.

 

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