Summer 2020
I left off last time with a fatalistic attitude: “Dread and relief at the same moment. It was almost poetic in a fatalistic Dostoevsky fashion.”1 Which was referencing an email I had just gotten from the SBA about my disaster loan application.
The status of your SBA Application No.330089xxxxx has been updated. Login to your SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan Portal account to continue with the next step.
After long days of work, phone calls, waiting for hours on hold, emails, and brain grinding worry here was the judgement of the Central Government relief program which could get us out of the predicament that they created. Or was it?
To my knowledge this was the first time Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) had ever been used for a pandemic or any other disaster on this scale. Usually implemented for storm or natural emergency relief the Covid event was a many faceted problem that spanned the globe and initially emanated from our sometimes friend the ruling autocrats of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as well as a variety of shady billionaires surround the bio-weapons industry.
Some of the players in this situation were pulling strings behind the scenes to hide involvement in a bio-weapon test or an accidental release of a banned agent neither of those possibilities could ever find relief from liability. So some very big names and even bigger countries were engaged in damage control.
Consequently down at the granular level where I live the situation was akin to throwing a bone to the little people so they don’t get out of control and bring their pitchforks out to the town square and start chasing the bureaucrats into the forest. The “Great Placation” was underway.
On the other hand, my wife and I were getting a bit desperate. We had no income except the sporadic expanded state Unemployment Compensation program that paid a subsistence stipend to us. Yes, that was dearly welcome but we were still out of work with no where to go. If I wanted to take my seven decades old carcass out and retrain it for some other occupation the punch line was…there aren’t any jobs because no one is hiring. The economy was at a standstill.
With this approval for a loan from the Government gave us some money to get by on. Believe me the amount was shaved to the bone by SBA algorithms that sent out just enough funds to sustain you until the end of the year when you would then be out of their hair. In other words they kicked the can down the road.
Of course this was a loan. The original idea of making these disaster funds into grants was stiff-armed by the top people for various political reasons (see Pandemic Diary #7 https://dsreif.substack.com/p/pandemic-diary-7). This was a loan that had to be paid back. With what I wondered?
It was not nearly enough to rebuild our business now that our production had been fallow for many months. Connections to events and customers lie dormant and withered. How would this money pay to rebuild that part of the business?
The SBA was well aware of this conundrum that infected small mom and pop business having studied them for years. It is precisely the strategy used with international loans to poor developing countries. Give them just enough money to get hooked on outside aid and then lock them into debt-traps forever2. In other words, “…providing projects/loans with too challenging terms for borrowers… to pay back…”. So even with low interest rates without the economic capacity to pay the principle people eventually are prey to the lender. In our case the U.S. government that just created the crisis in the first place.
At the time this sort of introspection was not a priority but the possibility that we were being played by bigger forces was in my thinking. But so what? There was nothing I could do about it except find the most likely path for personal survival.
We worked on sales wherever we could and did anything in sight to make a few bucks. We even went on forays and collected some native rock material and cut it so we didn’t have to buy material. We tried other strategies with little success.
I may not be gifted with psychic foresight but like Bob Dylan once said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Through long talks with my wife and others it started to become obvious that we could not sustain our little compound in the Ozarks let along afford to keep any presence in Florida with a small studio there.
Expenses could not be sustained on Compensation from the State or stopgap loans from the Feds. Without sales adequate funding was not in our future. We could likely reapplied for a larger loan from the SBA but that would really solve nothing except creating a deeper debt-trap.
The old saying, “It is an ill wind indeed that blows no one some good” formed an addendum to the Bob Dylan song. Concurrent to the Covid debacle there was an election going on with many manufactured social upheavals grabbing the headlines. City dwellers who were already paranoid about the Plague now had the BLM/Antifa riots on their doorstep. Many held funds from the recent boom years salted away and wanted to get out of the urban environment. Property sales in rural America were good. We lived in rural America.
The prospect of selling our property was a ghostly specter that had haunted some particularly dark cranny of my mind for several months. When not obsessing about some other terrible scenario or reliving a particularly troubling session with online government authorities occasionally I was visited by Leviathan the twisting Demon of Separation3. A serpent that surrounds you then twists the life from you body dragging your remains into the depths.
Separation from place is an evil plan. Pulling you out of your home and sending you into the netherworld of dislocated refugee. This process has literally killed people however we were in the dubious situation of having been employed in a nomadic profession for two or three decades.
In that regard being carried away by the rip tide of global politics was unpalatable and painful but not fatal. Yet the actual process of selling and moving was still a frightening prospect which was a bad option among many other options that were even worse.
By now Summer was winding down and the weather would soon start to change. In years past we would be working on our schedule that took us to festivals on the Gulf coast then the Florida Panhandle and eventually making our way to the south central part of the Sunshine State where we would base out of for several months.
Not this year. All attempts to schedule events were disappointing. If there even was a festival left to apply to then the prospectus was tentative at best. Most of our regular venues were cancelled. If there was a possibility of working it was filled with caveats regarding whether or not the hosting municipality or location would allow gatherings. Even though he Florida state departments looked more favorable to events still many local authorities were fearful. What few possibilities existed were longshots. Hence, our docket remained unfilled.
At this time there was no vaccine and many the remedies for the disease were under attack by Big Pharma so that the public was left nearly helpless. The jokers in the media did little but peddle fear, confusion, and chaos about the pandemic advising people to stay indoors, watch TV, then hide under the bed.
The upshot for us was more blind alleys and brick walls when it came planning the future. The prospect of making any money in the same way we had done for thirty years was dwindling so it was time to imagine a personal DEFCON 4.4 We decided to sell our house, studio, showroom, property, all of it.
A military term for next step “Annihilation”.
The issue is that things are not OK.
Awesome. Well written. It really takes us down your rabbit hole. No break in sight. Thanks.