Well, this certainly isn’t the direction I thought this year would go. Usually, the post I write in March celebrates the beginning of “event season,” and I talk about my excitement for finally getting out of the home office and interacting with dozens of new people throughout Iowa and the Midwest. With the country essentially shutting down for the next month, the travel schedule will be heavily impacted. We’ve even pulled the plug on Open Coffee for the next few weeks – my weekly outlet for conversation with people over the age of 8 – due to MERGE closing its doors to everyone except members. At this point, the schools have canceled in-person learning through the middle of April.
This is incredibly frustrating. This time of the year is one of my favorites – everything finally comes back to life after a long winter. I’m happy that we got the Entrepreneurial Event Panel done last week at 1MC Iowa City, and I was able to spend some time mentoring students at Iowa Startup Games two weeks ago. Now, it’s time to wait and see whether or not organizers for spring events decide to cancel – the waiting and the uncertainty surrounding the future timeline of infections from COVID-19 has to be the toughest part of this entire ordeal. So far, the Young Entrepreneur Convention has moved back from April 4 to the fall, and the Des Moines Tech Crawl has postponed from April 23 to June 18. As I find out more about the events we featured at the Entrepreneurial Event Panel, I plan to post updates to my social media channels.
Could this all have been avoided? Yes.
Is this situation an indictment of ineffective leadership at all levels over the past 30 years? Most definitely.
When I was active in the world of public health (believe it or not, I have a Master of Public Health in Health Communication), we were warning 10-15 years ago that the United States and the rest of the world were not ready for an event like this. Many local hospitals weren’t then and aren’t now able to handle mass casualty events like a toxic spill or a 50-car pile up on the local highway. Hospital supply chains are nearly all “just-in-time,” and most of the products are manufactured overseas. Durable medical equipment is expensive, and many healthcare organizations don’t see the need in having equipment gather dust in a closet, just in case something like COVID-19 or some other mass casualty event happens.
The fix for this is multi-faceted and would require a massive reshaping of the government’s role in healthcare, the way hospitals are managed, and the healthcare industry in general. We need to address both sides of supply/demand, not just apply quick fixes to one side or the other. Medicare for All increases demand and does nothing to address supply – it’s not the fix that the left claims it to be. It wouldn’t increase the supply of medical professionals, equipment, or hospitals; it would put us in the situation we’re witnessing play out in Italy. The status quo obviously isn’t working either. Believe it or not, the major impediment to fixing the system is, in fact, government.
I hate to keep harping on small government and philosophy of America’s founders, but many of my contemporaries seem to be falling for the authoritarianism that usually accompanies societal panic – much the way the Patriot Act followed 9/11. The proper branches of government need to step up and do what the founders designed them to do. Pushing the task of legislation off onto rules committees of unelected federal agencies put us in this mess. Kicking the responsibility to someone else has been an ongoing theme for decades, and that’s what put us in this predicament.
Unfortunately, I fear that we’re going to have hard times for years to come. We need to let things crash and self-correct; something that has needed to happen for decades. No amount of governmental bubble-inflating is going to fix this. It barely got us through the financial crisis 12 years ago. It’s not going to get us through this pandemic. At this point, we need to rip the bandage off completely and let things bottom out. It’s really going to hurt, but it’s the only way out of the predicament we’re currently facing.
We also need to move manufacturing back to the United States. Offshoring our production across an ocean was one of the most short-sighted moves that could have been made. Yeah, it’s cheaper in the short-term to manufacture things in east and southeast Asia. What about the long-term costs due to the lost jobs here? The opioid problem, the breakdown of communities in the rust belt, and empty store shelves during a crisis are certainly worse in the long-term than spending a few extra bucks to keep making your widgets stateside.
This crisis is going to completely reshape life as we know it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the defining moment of my children’s generation, much the way 9/11 defined my own generation, putting an end to the easy-going period after the end of the Cold War. We will eventually come out the other side of the tunnel, but I think it’s going to be a long, dark tunnel with an even longer recovery. Perhaps we’ll turn the corner and begin to mend society, leaning more on long-form dialogue than on short-form snark.
If there is a silver lining to the current situation, it’s that I might finally get to all of the “someday” projects that have been sitting around my house for years. All of you reading this probably have at least a handful of projects that, at one time or another, said, “I’ll get to that someday.” Maybe it’s something like cleaning the garage or organizing your bedroom closets. Perhaps it’s a creative project or a something business-related. Some of you may have a stack of books to read, a trove of podcasts you hadn’t listened to just yet, or an online course you’ve been meaning to complete. If you’re confined to your home because everything is closed and not because you’re sick, why not take care of those “someday” projects?
I had actually got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about all of the “someday” projects I’ve been accumulating over the years and started to wonder how long I could go before I ran out of things to do. The line of thinking was completely unrelated to the closure society is under at the moment. I could probably be confined to my home for six months and not run out of things to do, watch, or learn – in reality, I probably have over a year’s worth of “someday” projects to complete and content to consume. I would only need to leave my house to pick up groceries every couple of weeks and get a handful of things from the hardware store to complete some tasks around the house. Of course, all of these things could be delivered if we were forced into mandatory hermitage.
So, what’s next? How do I continue writing about an entrepreneur’s journey when we’re essentially frozen in place? First, let’s see how the next few weeks shape up. We’ve decided to move 1MC Iowa City to an online panel format, at least for the next three weeks. If this “social distancing” scheme works and allows the virus to exhaust its supply of new hosts, things should move back to normal by the time I’m supposed to travel to Michigan in mid-May for GLINTCAP.
I have a few other articles in the works at the moment about community building and entrepreneurial ecosystems that I might use to fill in the gap between now and the restart of civilization. I’ll still be releasing at least one book review each month – I have a stack of books to read again, and I’m planning to tear through those during this period of uncertainty. This should be a great period of building by many creatives, so take the time to discover new podcasts and new artists. With the amount of free content out there, you can’t possibly run out of things to watch or read. If you’re far enough south, get outside and breathe in some fresh air (but take your allergy medicine first, because it sounds like we’re supposed to have a pretty heavy pollen season this year.)
Rather than worrying about something that may not happen, now is the time to put your mind to something useful. It’s up to you to make the most of a bad situation.