Exit Strategy

A Facebook friend quipped the other day, “Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to a teenager…total disaster!”

Well, I thought about that for a minute, and could not help but respond back: “Since the ride is in progress, perhaps we should be thinking about an exit strategy.”

This comment was like a little cherry on top of a very sad cake that has been in the making for quite some time, and I just can’t keep my thoughts on the matter to myself anymore, so at the risk of sounding like Harold Camping, might I suggest that the end – while perhaps not “at hand” on any given predicted day – is in sight. The end of what, you might ask? Let me borrow the phrase from my survivalist friends: TEOTWAWKI: The End of The World As We Know It.

Let me just bring a few things to light, and issue a few disclaimers about my own sanity and rationality.

If you know me personally, you are probably aware that I recently closed my business – a little store on the edge of town in a community of about 35,000 people. It was a liquidation store, where I would buy all the leftover goods from the major chain stores by the truckload, and resell them to the fine people of this town at about half of what Wal-Mart sells them for. I also had a section of the store dedicated to what has become known as “Dent and Bent” groceries. These are what your supermarket throws away daily, as we highly educated people snub the box of cereal or crackers because there is a magic date at the top that suggests the food is no good any more. Or because the box got bent, or a can got dented, and since we are paying such top dollar for our food, we reject these. The fact that we are so gullible about the “quality” of our food, and treat the “Best if used by date” as if it were the date upon which food becomes poisonous, and is suddenly a national   health hazard is another topic for another blog – but suffice to say, we have the safest, most sanitized food in the world, and if you have one of these stores near you, you would do well to take advantage of it.

In any event, when I opened that store in 2007, we did a booming business. Who doesn’t like a deal? We expanded in 2008, and floated happily through 2009, and celebrated what looked like it would be a successful 2010.  However, life does not always go as expected.

Oh, the store did fine – provided someone was there at the wheel. And when my son’s diagnosis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy informed us that his health was on a down-turn, headed toward what is, for all intents and purposes, a quadriplegic state, my time at the store became less and less. Mark did a lot of the work – and my one hired employee was absolutely amazing in keeping our little ship afloat. But the hard cold fact was that I could not keep up with the demands in both camps. By the time September rolled around, and my son needed spinal fusion from his neck to his butt, it looked like we might be headed toward the end of the line.

I put the store up for sale, but the few people who were feeling like the actually wanted to start a business in this gloomy economy took one look at all the work that it takes to keep a store with over 10,000 items at any given time well stocked and open…when they realized that running your own business is a 24/7 kind of thing, to which you are indeed married, well, it didn’t sell. By the time January rolled around, we knew it was time, and we implemented what was lurking there in the business plan since 2007: Our exit strategy.

First rule of any business venture is to have a plan, and part of that plan is the part you would rather not contemplate, but if you have a business brain in your head you will put aside your sentimentality, and realize that business is business – and things do not always go as planned. For me it was family health issues. For some, it’s poor financial management. For some, it’s the economy, or the competition, but whatever it is, you need to have in your lead suitcase a little map that tells you when you need to leave so that your finances remain intact. A little magic number, perhaps, that says when we reach this, we will have to pull up stakes. To save that which remains, to salvage what is left, to sell out….whatever it may be for your particular endeavor – it’s time to close the chapter, cut your losses, and move on. Can ANYONE tell me this is NOT prudent?

My little business had a modest 5-figure line of credit. I had decided that if I could not pay anything on the principal after a number of months, then I would have to bail. At no time did I ever consider not paying principle AND interest on my bigger 5-figure note. It would never occur to me to borrow money to pay my employee. If we could not afford to pay her – and she was worth her weight in gold! – then I would have to take over those duties myself – and that would require my stunt double, who is as booked as I am.

And so, we restructured.  We closed up shop and brought the business home, and now run it completely on-line, with a whole new business plan, including a new, improved exit strategy.

But now – if you would, indulge me in what might have happened if I ran my business the way our government is running OUR country. I would keep spending – and keep borrowing. I would have hired a slew of employees that I could not afford, and would borrow money to pay them. If my store only brought in $10,000 in a month, and I paid out $15,000 in bills, there should be some serious discussion about where we could cut back, don’t you think? But no – in this case, I just keep going back to the bank and getting my credit limit raised, and pay nothing on the principle, and borrow more money to pay my initial note. If the banker balks, I tap into my retirement account. I max out every credit card I’ve got, and pay nothing but interest on what I have borrowed, because the hard, cold fact is I am not making enough money to pay even the basic overhead of inventory, rent, utilities, and employees, much less to pay interest on the ever increasing debt.  So, at $10,000 a month income – and now $100,000 a month out-go in interest alone…what kind of business person am I? Let’s try on SUCCINT FAILURE for starters.

Now, for the Gazillion Dollar question: What are the odds I will EVER – I mean EVER – get out of debt and pay this all back AND (we can dream, can’t we) turn a profit? Come on, surely there is a financial wizard out there who is still in touch with reality who can cook my books to make it happen, can’t they?

Well, sure! They are all working for your government – and they make fun appearances on the national news every now and again, assuring us that there is a rebound in our economy; that unemployment is falling, that if you all just take it easy, happy days will be here again in no time. Your President just told you that this whole scenario is just some “bumps in the road”.  My politically correct reaction is to clear my throat, swallow hard when I hear that and inquire, “Is that so?”  The real me steps back from the screen with an incredulous stare and asks, “Are you fucking kidding me?” My intelligence is insulted – and yours should be too.

Since we already four pages into this, let me just take the blunt route and ask you how do you think this will play out? How long do you think we can keep this going with no money? Seriously – stop and really, really THINK about it. Because if you choose not to – and I totally understand why you would NOT want to – you will probably die. Sound melodramatic? Then you have not truly thought about it. You are buying into the bullshit that they are feeding you on TV about how everything is really fine, under control, “bumps in the road” as it were…your money is safe, your borders are secure, your job is still there, the grocery stores are still full – despite gas prices on the rise, it’s business as usual and will continue to be that way for as long as you live, and your children live, and your children’s children. Happy, happy, happy!!

Have you learned nothing from history? There have been, throughout the history of the world, societies just as content and prosperous as we are who were cleared from the map in no time. Don’t think these were some primitive tribes, scuffling in the dirt. Do you think the Jewish population of Germany were a bunch of idiots? We see them now in black and white footage, naked and emaciated and being herded into camps – but did it ever occur to you that a short time prior to that they were dining as Bistros that rival our finest here? That they had beautiful belongings decorating lovely homes…that they were people at every stage of life – young families, middle aged parents, grandparents, with happy lives and enough to eat. In their case, it was a government gone wrong that brought them to the brink of genocide. But they were just as real as you and I. they had the same thoughts, feelings, emotions, loved, cried, laughed…and relied on a government to keep them safe and prosperous.

But that’s only one scenario. Anyone care to ask the survivors of the Japanese Tsunami or Missouri tornado what matters most? Talk about a reality check, courtesy of Mother Earth. And those are just two of the ways she has gently reminded us that we are NOT greater than nature – we are, in fact, a part of it. Remember? From dust we came, and to dust we shall return. Every molecule in your being has its origin in her, and she can reclaim it pretty much any time, and does not require your permission to do so.

Then there is the threat of other governments upon whom we depend. You think gas is pricey now? If the folks in the Middle East get in a pissing match – with or without US poking that bear with a stick – watch them soar off the charts and out of the stratosphere. Think that might affect your budget?

There’s the little fact of the dollar being the world reserve currency. But have you noticed that your dollar is becoming worth slightly less these days? You THINK food prices are rising. Nope – and egg is still and egg, and a gallon of milk is still a gallon of milk. But in reality it is your dollar that is getting smaller, and smaller, so it takes a lot more of them to buy the stuff you need to keep food on your table. A relative of mine went to Australia recently, and traded their dollars for the Aussie variety on the way in for $1.03. A week later, they traded them back for $1.15. That’s a fairly big drop in just a week. And it fluctuates daily, like a flag in the breeze. There was a time here – yes, on our own soil – when certain money became totally and completely worthless overnight. Ask anyone who was the inheritor of a chest full of confederate bills. If you think it can’t happen again in some way, you are in denial. And it will be to your own hurt.

There you have the three scenarios that can level the world playing field, and take you and yours with it. And to be honest, who can know which will take center stage as the years go by? Who cares? The hard and cold fact is that something WILL happen – if not in your lifetime, your children’s – or your grandchildren’s…and my question to you is what are we teaching them today that will see them through what promises to be a very, very difficult time?

The school in my town needed to cut the budget – so what did the axe? Home Ec. Again – whose brilliance was on display in THAT move? I came to the realization recently that my own daughters do not know how to properly measure flour, or even make a decent batch of cookies without a recipe. They did not know what leavening was, what kinds there were, or the purpose they serve. They have no clue how to plant or tend a garden, and sadder still, no desire to do so, and no reason to even contemplate the necessity of it.

And lest we think of Home Economics as merely cooking brownies and cookies – it should actually include a home budget. My graduate this year has no clue how to figure out interest rates on a car purchase, much less real estate. Auto insurance is seen as nothing more than a bill that needs to be paid. They do not know what a deductible is. They have almost zero comprehension of what a credit report is, how to get one, maintain one, and the importance of having one in today’s economy. Do you? Do yours? I say this to MY shame – because I have been relying on an educational system to teach them all these survival skills in addition to reading and writing – while I pursue the struggle for the legal tender needed to pay for their food, shelter and clothing.

 I see the graduates today, and I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling like standing up and applauding an accomplishment. They haven’t learned anything that will truly help them in a world that is crumbling under their feet. They just stuck it out for the required 12 years. Whoop-de-do…like they had a choice with the truancy laws being what they are. So, I’ll celebrate with my “graduate” this year much like you would celebrate the end of an incarceration. Good for you…back to the real world now, where you will no doubt find that your recent education has netted you nothing. In some cases, they cannot even spell properly, or read anything heavier than the lyrics to a song on YouTube. They don’t want to. They want to be entertained. I honestly can’t say when education stopped actually educating – but with my 2.25 years of high school, I came out WAY ahead of where the four-year grads are today – thanks in part to one fantastic teacher who encouraged me to actually think as I learned.

Again, the educational failure is another blog also – but for my purposes here today, it is sufficient to say that should us Boomers be so lucky as to never see another war, famine, disease, or natural disaster in our lifetime, our children most likely will – and they are in no way equipped to handle it. And if we are not so lucky – an honest appraisal of our own lives will reveal in neon letters: Neither are we.

I don’t spill all this today as someone who has some answer to this dilemma – and it IS a dilemma. I am throwing this out there as a question to my fellow man: Hey…realistically, there is some very nasty shit that is certainly going to hit the fan, and more likely sooner than later. What are YOU gonna do about it? Because I have been giving it a lot of thought, and I’m coming up with a big fat question mark. Maybe we could pool some thoughts here?

Not that I am uneducated in survival to a small degree. I’ve spent my time obsessing over it in time past, when the Christian platform I was standing on demanded that we prepare for TEOTWAWKI. We moved to the country – because we could afford to. We banded together with a few good people, and raised our own food. We had a years worth of food and paper products stored up, a house wired for generator power, an acre garden, a barnful of critters for eggs, milk and meat. Thousands of canning jars, a library full of How-To books and an impressive armory. But unfortunately, when you attach TEOTWAWKI to a religion, one size does not fit all, and my personal population explosion taxed me to the –nth degree. Homeschooling five, three in diapers, one on the way, and heart cries that went unheard lead me to a Kamikaze move that ended it all, and I moved back to the city with no regrets.

I’ve subsequently lived a life-time or two – and the world situation does not need a religious interpretation. In fact, I’m looking at it right now strictly from a financial perspective – which includes all kinds of irrefutable facts. No guess work, here. Our house of cards is shaking in the wind, and although I happen to be on the bottom of it, it’s causing some serious soul-searching.

Ignoring it – which I have done for a number of years – is not making it go away. It is not getting better. Let me just say it for the record: ALL IS NOT WELL.

If you have the mistaken idea that this political leader or that one can fix this, you are not grounded in reality. Check-mate is check mate.

And it’s not that I don’t have a spiritual perspective – but that is mine, and you need to have your own. I will say, however, that if you are relying on a Third Party Abstract to save you should things get ugly, you have a rude awakening coming. Ask the recent victims of nature’s wrath. We cannot “blame” God as we understand it – we can only seek solace from our position in the rubble. God as I understand it is not going to deliver us from “evil” we have brought upon ourselves. In my opinion, we have simply forgotten who we are, and what we are. Our spirits have an origin in the spirit realm – but the bodies that host us are dependent upon the Earth from which we came, and to which we shall return. We are also dependent upon the other people in the sphere of our influence, their attitudes and actions. Every spiritual system and religion as far as I know it has some creedo which encourages us to live lives of peace, goodness, and kindness, and in harmony with the earth we live upon.

Being a voracious reader with an intense love of learning, I’ve become a bit of an anthropology buff these days. I’ve enjoyed reading how we began – both here in my America, as well as the rest of the globe. It seems to me, that our far-off ancestors found all that they needed to survive within the provisions of the planet. They had a view that we were, in fact, a PART of nature – and not somehow above it. All religions had their basis in this at one point or another. “Subduing” the earth had nothing to do with beating into submission to our “superior” knowledge. It had everything to do with organizing the elements so that they benefited us without harm to either.

Thomas E. Mails, chief contributor to the information regarding Native Americans for the movie “Dances with Wolves” has written several books about this very subject, and had a very interesting point. In his book regarding the Hopi Prophecies, “The HOPI Survival Kit”, he states, “Even though we know that there were at least twenty million natives in South and Middle America, and ten million in North America – surely enough to make a mess somewhere – when the first explorers arrived here they marveled at how pristine everything was. This was due to the Native attitude regarding the rest of creation. They saw themselves as a part of it, as blended with it, and not something separate and superior. Under these circumstances one does not wantonly litter or destroy. Europeans had, and still have, trouble coming to grips with this kind of behavior. …where conquests are concerned, we have not been able to identify ourselves with a people who would by nature treat nature as an equal.”

There was a time when we understood this, and in fact, movies like Dances with Wolves and Native American culture appeal to a very broad audience because I believe that somewhere inside of us we miss this. We miss the fact that living simply WAS life. We had cultures of people that consisted of tribes, clans, and families. We knew where we belonged within such, and as a result had no significant problems with displace, depressed, or discarded people. Their religious ceremonies were designed to keep them in touch with the earth; planting, and harvest, and thanksgiving and a period of rest and contemplation. This was LIFE. And it was good.

Somewhere along the line, we drifted. We foisted upon the natives beliefs and ideas that were not theirs. To offer a differing belief system would have been one thing – but we insisted they discard theirs for ours – at gun-point. Yes – being currently immersed in Native American studies, this is at the front and center of my brain – but this current line of research is my feeble attempt at making some sense out of all that is sitting in front of me today.

Look at how this has worked out for us here, in the long run. We replaced our involvement with the land, and put ourselves in a position of having to now purchase everything that we used to be able to provide for ourselves and our families and villages. Those us who still enjoy digging in the dirt now do so as a hobby relegated to the weekend, when we are not at “work”, earning money so that we can pay for our food, our clothes, our shelter, our heat, our electricity, our water. Our upwardly mobile progress has not only put us out of a job – it has put us out of our very life.

Funny how we tell people who squander time in what we deem frivolous ways to “get a life”. None us have the life that we were granted by our Creator. If I don’t come up with enough money – my water gets shut off. If I don’t have enough money from whatever my “job” is that replaced my own self sufficiency, I’m screwed. No heat, no lights, no food, no gas…the list goes on indefinitely, until you have what we see in the cities all around us: People who have become totally dependent on the government for their subsistence. They can’t even have a garden, or chickens, or a milk cow. They are quite simply, fucked.

How did we allow this to happen? Did we not see that we have done to the initial human unit? Humans lived, as I said, since time began, in groups. Tribes, clans, villages, families. Everyone had a part – a purpose – and that was to the good and benefit of the whole. Each one knew their place – and learned a skill or skills to contribute to the good of the whole. We shared. We cared. We respected our elders, and taught the children to do so also. We accomplished this together – we worked together, played together, prayed together, laughed together, mourned together. But with the advent of “new and better things”, we separated ourselves out. In America, we English saw the Native population, and spurned them for their primitiveness. And while they had their own unique sets of tribal problems, none of them involved “progress”, or destroying water sources or other natural resources. There was enough for everyone. If we simply look within the tribal life, we saw people living a life that actually worked – for centuries. But with more, and better, and stronger, and mechanized, and faster, we did away with not only a great deal of difficult laborious work – but we did away with the need for other people.

I find it interesting that the Christian religion and it’s political spokespersons today will freak out about gay marriage, or “living in sin”, touting that the Man-Woman-Child family is the epitome of the human unit of measure. But look back a bit further, will you? It used to be families, within clans, within villages, within tribes, within races. What happened to the unity of race? The existence of tribes? The cohesiveness and community of villages? The interdependence and support of a clan? You mean to say all we have left is family? No wonder they are geeking out over the loss of that! Apparently they have noticed – finally – that we have essentially eliminated that, too, and we are down to individual people, where it’s every man for himself. Take a look around you! People are so lonely – depressed – sad. We are isolated from one another to such a high degree…and it’s been that way long enough for us to consider this the norm.

And we are teaching this to our children.

In fact, when we moved out to the country, and lived in community, we were considered very, very strange by most. A cult, to be sure. But for those who hung out with us long enough to know us, despite a faulty base, we had a lot of fun, a lot of unity, a lot of abundance, a lot of support. We also had a lot of work, but each one did their part, and at the end of a day we shared an abundant home-grown meal together, prepared by the women while the men worked outside. It was a small sample of days, eras, people groups – long gone.  And today, when I look back on it, I realize how blessed I was to have a taste or raising a family in true community.

It has dawned on me in the course of my studies, that this is not a “problem” – for by its nature, a problem is something that has a solution. It is clearly a dilemma – something for which there is no “right” answer.   

To be continued...