A Thank You to Business People

I am incredibly grateful for and in awe of the first responders, health care workers, and all front line Americans. I’m grateful for grocery store and other workers who are ensuring we all get the essentials we need. I’m grateful for all the teachers that continue to engage with students so that they can maintain their education. I’m rooting for and my heart goes out to all the small businesses struggling during this time. These are sentiments that are widely shared and recognized. Today I’d like to give a shout out to a group that gets very little positive press…. business people. I have the pleasure of interacting with large corporations every day, along with interacting with my own “large corporation” colleagues, and what I have seen is a tireless effort to keep this economy going. Everywhere I turn I see people working 12-14 hour days while simultaneously juggling the care of small children and elderly parents. Large corporations are easily villainized as greedy, malevolent, and misanthropic. What I have seen, however, is the following: Large companies are repurposing their manufacturing facilities to efficiently mass-produce the PPE so desperately needed by our front line workers. Large companies are responsible for the innovation that is affording all of us the ability to see our family and friends virtually along with the bandwidth to do so. Large hotel conglomerates are opening their hotels to the homeless and the sick.  Management in large companies worked day and night to ensure their employees have the tools and processes to work safely at home. Those same people are now working day and night to figure out how to get people back to work in the safest way possible. If this didn’t happen there would be a lot more than 30 million unemployed Americans. And how does society think unemployment claims get paid? Of course, a health care worker and a web designer contribute to society in very different ways. One ensures the physical health of our people, and the other ensures economic health. That web designer is the reason a web site is easy enough to use that a 75 year old can order her prescription on-line. It’s easy to say that only lives matter, but without a strong economy the life most of us have become very accustomed to, take for granted even, will not be the life we have on the other side of COViD-19. So let’s take a minute to say thank you to all members of society…. Each of us are contributing to getting through this pandemic.