Move Forward with Caution, but Do Move Forward
For the sake of your business, we hope you’re in an area where there are signs that things are going to reopen soon. And we hope that if you’re ready you can proceed as best you can to try to generate revenue, put your people back to work, and claw your way back to “normal.”
But there are those that say that nothing will ever be normal again, or that there will be some sort of “new normal.” Honestly, there wasn’t all that much wrong with the old normal, and we don’t see any reason why we all shouldn’t work toward that objective.
Yet maybe it depends on what a “new normal” means. Perhaps it means that more people will be able to work from home, or more parents will have the opportunity to teach their kids themselves at home, or more students will be able to gain higher education through less-costly online classes and spare themselves a lifetime of debt.
Those are good new normals, and we’re all for those. But if it means everyone will be afraid to shake hands, or stockpiling of toilet paper and cleaning supplies continues for the foreseeable future, or our favorite restaurants have all gone out of business while we were all locked down, that’s not a new normal we’d welcome.
As you move forward, we hope you won’t be overly timid when it comes to your business. For a while, of course, we should all be careful. Nothing wrong with keeping things sanitized, wearing masks – if you choose – or holding back from hugging your favorite customers. But it is possible to be both bold and cautious at the same time, and if our economy is going to recover, it is going to call for a degree of boldness.
Caution and fear are two very different things, and we hope that all of us can focus on the former and resist the latter. We’ve spent several months now in fear, and it’s not a great way to live or try to earn a living. Speaking as a Christian, I have to say that if we were as good at putting the fear of Hell into people as the epidemiologists have been at generating fear of The Virus, we sure would see the religious awakening we’ve been praying for.
We wish you the very best in going forward.