One Day At A Time Is all we can do!

By Paul Feeney, Publisher
Thank God for the St. Patrick’s Day that wasn’t really one after all.
Because before anyone knew there wouldn’t be a parade or any type of large gathering allowed, our St. Patrick’s Day edition was printed and delivered.
And thanks to the support of our advertisers I am able to publish this edition and be able to pay the printer. There is always the adage that stares the publishers of any publication in the face; publish or perish.
As soon as you skip a beat and miss an issue, you are presumed dead and that is usually the case.
The President, Governors nationwide and our own Mayor Walsh have made the decisions they made and here we are today with an economy on the verge of collapse.
Did they make the right decisions?
It appears that only time will tell.
I thought it was going to just be for two weeks, now they are talking into the summer. This morning on Fox TV (Mar. 19) they were saying that finally Democrats and Republicans are acting in a bi-partisan way and that was a good thing. There is not a single voice arguing that maybe these were the wrong decisions. Everyone is acting on the side of caution. None wants the finger of blame put on them.
It started with the media attacking the President that he wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. It appeared to be a deliberate, sustained attempt to prove him totally incompetent as a leader. But he bounced right back and assembled a seemingly highly trustworthy team of health experts and began to fight back his critics.
Now, we read that no new cases of the virus have been reported in China and that it appears the China curve may be flattened and that from that report our health experts can now predict a probable date of curve flattening for America.
Then, others say we cannot trust China as they held the real truth about the spread of this virus back from the world.
In a letter sent out by Mayor Walsh, he said to take it one day at a time and all of us are doing just that, because any second, any minute, any hour of the day there may be new instructions we must heed.
It is always good to take one day at a time when you are troubled at any time in your life, but in business you have to prepare for the many days ahead. You have to have faith in the future in order to invest in the future and right now, businesses are struggling to see the future clearly.
They have no choice but to live day by day.
On Wednesday I dropped into a favorite sub and pizza shop in West Roxbury to have one of their fantastic tuna fish subs with lettuce, tomato and mayo. I always enjoy sitting down to eat there, to take time to enjoy a simple sandwich. I hate eating in the car, but I had no choice.
The restaurant owner had the eating area all cordoned off as every restaurant does today. I was grateful he was even open and decided to hold off eating until I got home about two hours later, just not being able to eat in the car.
I asked if he would renew his ad as he has always done, and he said. . .” no, no, no, I am not paying out anything to anyone.”
He was clearly worried about the days ahead; just as I am and just as we all are as we face those days ahead together as a people, as a city, state and nation.
One business owner in a TV interview who to date has enjoyed great success and is able to withstand the closing down of his restaurants and the lack of business at his car dealerships for the short-term, said he is bound to run out of cash reserves sooner than later.
I asked my wife what should I do this week?
Should I publish this week?
“Absolutely,” she said, “you’ll get through it, you always do.”
And it is with her confidence in my ability to weather any storm that I move forward towards the future.
I remember years ago, asking someone what would happen if the Social Security System collapsed. “We’ll all go down in the ship together,” he said.
Some good things will come out of this, I am sure.
My 3rd grade granddaughter will be participating in Zoom conference calls with her teacher via the internet. The photos of every student will be all around the monitor screen. Her learning will continue outside the classroom setting. Likewise with the students at Harvard and other colleges, classes will be conducted over the internet.
I remember when the first colleges offered off campus instruction via the internet and they were ridiculed and looked down upon. Now our most prestigious colleges, Harvard and many others like them, see no problem with internet course instruction.
Does this represent a possible future trend, where a college degree can be obtained from prestigious private and public colleges without living on the campus or attending classes in a traditional campus setting?
One thing is for sure, our nation’s current, future and past college students are confronted with college loan payments so much so that they were wholeheartedly behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.
To them the issue of college debt was so important many were willing to want our current form of government to become a so-called Democratic Socialist state.
Now Joe Biden says he hears them. He is reaching out to them and he understands where they are at and why they liked Bernie so much.
There is of course an undercurrent of optimism that as soon as the corona virus crisis is past, our economy will bounce right back and everything will return to normal. We’ll have to wait and see taking it of course, a day at a time.
We are all in the same boat together. Hopefully, we are going to stay afloat and complete the journey.
As far as erring on the side of caution as all our political leaders seem to be doing, there is still the other side to the story. In speaking with a very political person he remarked that there is something eerie about the severe reaction to this virus when the regular flu is known to kill up to 35,000 people a year and no one seems to care about that. Our reactions to past events such as the Swine Flu and Ebola were never this severe. Now, at some banks, you need an appointment to meet with your banker inside the bank. With any critical event affecting the well-being of our country all sides of a story must be told and discussed.
We were a country rolling along with low unemployment, stock market high, etc. and within what seemed like seconds, we are on a tailspin with no end yet in sight. We pray now for that spinning to stop.