How To Trash Your Business With One Decision

Two cautionary tales for our times

Warning to Dear Reader, this is a mask rant, not without good cause. I am taking a break from my attempt to focus on the positive because of several conversations lately.

My buddy Bill (not his real name) is that rare combination of 30-year Army veteran, Ranger training, seriously liberal Democrat. He’s not schizo. Like me, he served, honorably, loyally, but his politics don’t bend in that way that so many assume about veterans. More so, our military service, combined with considerable international travel, has made us centrists in many things. We believe in science. Bear with me here, these are key to the story.

Bill’s got a home in Nevada’s Incline Village, where he moved some years ago to accommodate his skiing Jones. At 70, he just had his fourth knee operation. He can’t ski any more. In light of this year’s terrible fires, he made the decision to sell and move back east to be close to family. His town home is in a highly desirable area. The sale went smoothly, but with a catch.

The house requires a fair bit of remodeling work. This is where our first tale begins.

Bill had multiple jobs that needed immediate attention. Tens of thousands’ worth of work. He walked in- masked, as usual- to a local contractor’s office to solicit bids.

The white male owner, a guy in his fifties, sat at the desk. He looks up, sees Bill (an imposing guy at 6'4" and an athletic build), and says without any humor or sarcasm:

“You can take your mask off in here. We don’t believe in that liberal bullshit.”

Bill spun on his heel and marched out the door.

Loss to the contractor: tens of thousands of dollars of business.

Bill, who is even more loquacious than I am, will make sure all his neighbors and friends and anyone else in earshot know about it. And on Yelp.

At a time when a great many companies are struggling.

On a smaller scale but just as pertinent:

Our second story.

For a thousand and one reasons I’ve not been inside a hair salon since December. I’ve got hair down to my ass, it’s got split ends to beat the band, and is desperately in need of a trim. Just before I went to the hospital for surgery two weeks ago, I thought about getting that all-important trim. Such small things add a lift to the psyche.

A tiny kindness. And, it would also help out a small operator.

Just next to the local Fred Meyer store is such a salon. I’m brand new here so I don’t have a regular place. I approached the broad glass storefront which featured a cheerful OPEN sign on the front. I had my hand on the door when I looked inside.

Neither the stylists nor the patrons were wearing masks.

I spun on my heel and went grocery shopping instead.

I will never use that salon. Worse, I will warn others off them. Yelp is useful like that.

At a time when many small businesses are struggling.

Bill and I are hardly alone. Here’s a representative comment from reader Noel Minneci:

…I already have a “list” of businesses that support the current president and I won’t ever shop with those places. Add masks to the list. I may be old but I have money to spend and I know where NOT to spend it!

In case you’re unaware, here’s one list that might help you choose were to spend your increasingly diminishing dollars:

This is America. Land of the Free to be Irresponsible About Others’ Health and the Brutishly Stupid About Science. You want to do what you like in your brick and mortar store, your consultancy, you have at it, Sparky.

But in 2020, that comes at a cost.

Masking has become a white hot flashpoint as powerful as racism. Not surprisingly the two are closely intertwined, given the disproportionate impact on communities of color. Shockingly, and increasingly, the business of wearing masks has drawn political lines in the sand.

As if being White and a Trumpist offers immunity to a virus which doesn’t give a flying fuck how you voted.

You can’t legislate stupidity.

Lest you think I’m over-reacting, please see this:

There is no excuse for this. None whatsoever. So you will excuse me if I rant, for my rant is about what is happening to lots and lots of people. LOTS of people. And I care. That’s the fundamantal problem. That’s what makes me so crazy.

I CARE. Like about half the country cares, about the half that still doesn’t.

For people like Bill and me, for whom the science is clear and unequivocal, and for whom this is not a political issue but a health challenge, if your business decides to side with The Party of Fools, well.

Good luck with that business plan, Skeezix.

Families are already suing over wrongful deaths when workplaces failed to protect their loved ones. You really think that this can’t happen to you if one of your Anti-Liberal Freedom Fighters spreads Covid into a home full of kids and grammies when they come over to fix the fireplace?

Think again:

One reason that those of us about to go bust waiting for economic help is because the current Head Turtle (oh sorry) Feckless Leader of the Grand Old Party of Irresponsibility is fighting to make sure businesses cannot be sued by those who have every goddamned right to sue the assholes who forced people into known danger and either died or are now crippled. I have no clue when the Party of Personal Responsibility became the Party of Irresponsible Dimwits but it happened in my lifetime. No idea how that’s going to pan out, but in this case, Pelosi is right to fight for our right to rake selfish, self-serving assholes over the coals in court for causing death and destruction in the name of profits. But I digress.

It’s enough that those folks who genuinely care about our own health and that of the community are going to start selecting ONLY those companies who take this shit seriously.

Those whose families have lost people due to negligence and the outright brazen disregard for peoples’ safety may well find themselves launching multiple lawsuits against folks who were cavalier about money over people’s right to live. Those business owners who thought that the economy, which is run by people, clearly doesn’t need live people. Just money.

Just like their heroic president. Stupid, spineless, ignorant, brutish and morally, spiritually, ethically, emotionally and financially…

BANKRUPT.

Yeah. Good luck with that business plan, Sparky.

Because when the economic engine does finally cough back into business, we will remember. And we will vote with our wallets, our conscience and our commitment to community, which, if you’ll forgive the obvious, includes everyone. As in EVERYBODY.

Perhaps the most vivid of all the indications of where we are as a nation was this protestor:

The weak being the elderly, the disabled, most certainly anyone of color. I wonder, if this cretin happens to have an elderly grandmother, if she was willing to throw grams under the bus, for being weak, so that she could go shop at Piggly-Wiggly?

Weak?

How about Bill and I drag you up the side of a seventeen thousand foot mountain, Skeezix, and we’ll find out who’s weak.

While this is indeed an overstatement on my part, my friends in the medical field will back me on this: not wearing a mask, right here, right now, with our hospitals full, our medical community dropping like flies from exhaustion and illness themselves, is tantamount to committing manslaughter, if not outright intentional murder. Especially as those who are infected who find it funny to intentionally cough and sneeze on others are wont to do.

These are some of the same folks who found it so awful that the first gay men infected with HIV AIDS in the early days, then a death sentence, went on to intentionally infect so many others out of revenge.

Help me understand the difference.

Precisely. There is none.

Which is why I want to vomit every time I see or hear the phrase, “we’re all in this together.”

No. We aren’t. Not at all.

If wearing a mask places me on the side of the “weak,” which includes the disabled (my hand is up) the old (my hand is up) too many veterans (my hand is up), people of color, as well as a slew of folks who have chosen to err on the side of protecting EACH OTHER as well as themselves,

Call me weak.

And just in case you might have missed this, those folks who are so enamored of the “Master Race” that Hitler (and Trump) espoused, it was utter and total bullshit. Please see:

Those folks were fucked up on meth, heroin, coke, morphine.

From the article:

By 1938, large parts of the population were using Pervitin (a form of synthesized meth) on an almost regular basis, including students preparing for exams, nurses on night duty, businessmen under pressure, and mothers dealing with the pressures of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church — to which the Nazis thought women should be relegated). Ohler quotes from letters written by the future Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, then serving in the German army, begging his parents to send him more Pervitin. Its consumption came to be seen as entirely normal.

Master race my ass.

What’s weak is attacking, condemning and committed genocide against the weak. America used to stand for protecting the weak, the persecuted, the disadvantaged. Now we stand in the eyes of a shocked world for some of the worst humanity can offer in how we treat our own citizens. We have no moral authority whatsoever. It’s a long road back to respectability.

So you will pardon us if Bill and I go do business with folks committed to the community. Supporting folks who are willing to sacrifice a little convenience for the good of all.

For those who are convinced that the virus ain’t real, that it’s a liberal hoax….

Good luck with that business plan, Sparky.