Pandemic Diary #7
Begging
July 2020
The Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) program like most government programs is a mixed bag. According to the available information about this SBA (Small Business Administration) managed program "The EIDL ( Economic Injury Disaster Loan), is not the same thing as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) offered to small business owners suffering from business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 virus. Because the loan amounts for a PPP loan and the requirements for using the funds to primarily support payroll, for many small business owners who don’t have sufficient employees and don’t compensate themselves within a traditional payroll model [are excluded]... the EIDL loan requirements are different."
The public perception at the time was that these were government grants for people who were put out of business by the plandemic.* This was not quite true. At first there was some grant money BUT the people in the central government quickly thought better of themselves. Very soon they decided that even though there was vast liability lurking behind the government foreknowledge and eventual handling of the attack and ensuing crisis, granting money to sole proprietor and micro-business might not be a very good move politically. After all these mom-and-pop stores had little clout and the grant money might be better used to bolster interests who were more closely aligned to Washington's interests👿.
I did not know about these nuances when faced with a future limited to few options and almost none included a livelihood that resembled anything like what we had for several decades. I did not know we were about to be "reset" by a series of global changes scripted far away in conference rooms and meetings attended by the representatives of oligarchs, international business crime families, and think-tanks manned by faceless bureaucrats. Whether driving the plague crisis or just waiting to take the "reset" plan off the shelf and implement it at the next available global catastrophe it really does not make a difference. The intention is the same, using a mass event to upset and reorganize economic conditions from top to bottom.
Yet there I was eyes glued to the glowing computer panel flipping from one screen to another trying to decipher the government rules and regulations necessary to qualify for a loan program I knew nothing about just a few days before. I obediently downloaded the appropriate documents which lead me to find another group of documents to prove the necessary requests required by the first set of documents. The invasive and somewhat humiliating but mandatory information that Washington demanded piled up.
After a few days of trying to decipher a situation so unfamiliar to me that I thought I had left my body. I was now entrapped into a trans-human computer network stroking the keys and awaiting the response from my master somewhere buried deep in the silicon digital information links anchored to who-knows-where. My masters were monitoring my every move while enjoying the scenery outside of Geneva. Or so my not so far fetched imagination informed me. It was not at all a pleasant daydream for an artist-gig worker-unemployed survivor of a bio weapons attack.
I persevered checking boxes, providing documents that proved I was not a deadbeat or grifter, and generally signing my own guilty confession. Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror🔪 in the USSR was famous for saying, "Show me the man and I will show you the crime"; came to my mind quite often. Somewhere in the blizzard of documents I processed I had to have made a mistake; a typo, improper comma usage, transposed number, lapse of memory. Was that a Federal crime? **
That was the atmospherics of the situation. Government forms with scary language leading to a possible loan that I did not want but was stuck with getting or the bottom would completely fall out of our little lives. I did not want to do it but at the same time I prayed that it would be approved for I knew what the consequences were. Rock and Hard Place...the cafeteria of dread.
I worked on the application compulsively for what seemed a geological epoch although it was likely less than a week. Then the portentous day arrived and I uploaded a large tranche of Washington's finest forms to be processed by a group of overworked underpaid office staff who may well have been dragooned into service for the avalanche of applications that were coming at them. Then we waited.
Looking back at the experience I was not exercising the most critical thinking. I was completely driven by fear and emotion without regards to the consequences of IF I did get accepted for a loan having been turned down for other programs.
The amount of money involved was almost nothing by Washington standards. This was less than two days for high ranking members of the SBA secretariat at a fashionable conference site. Paltry monetary arithmetic in the Washington world and not enough by any stretch of the imagination to create a capital environment that would sustain the relaunch of our decidedly miniature business. I did not see that at first.
By then my horizons had shrunk precipitously to where I thought of replacing a sanding belt on a lapidary machine but did not know that this tool would not be sufficient to lift production to a level where we could become solvent. I was completely blind to the concept that the marketing model of working high end retail art fairs had not only collapsed but would take years if ever to come back to past benchmarks. The world of public events was being attacked at every turn. Covid, cancellations, financing, insurance, and transportation issues were piling up waiting to be addressed let alone solved. This was supposing the global planners were the slightest bit interested in what was happening in the anthill below their feet.
No indeed, the life giving I V bottle of blood💉 was only 10% filled and put on a slow drip so it might seem sufficient. While the machine beeped and flashed vital signs on a screen with display numbers dancing about, the patient it was hooked up to began to feel that the situation was stable. For the moment a beguiling sense of security hovered over me for the near term but the prognosis was inevitably poor. I wondered what these experiences were going to look like in the book I was writing.
*Unraveling the Narrative
**In the early days of the so-called Steele Dossier investigation the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would answer in the affirmative.
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