I woke up this morning needing a pep talk. With no Knute Rockne there nor drill sergeant, I turned to myself for some inspiration. I didn't exactly find a Rockne speech in me. I was able to remind myself that our current situation is not normal, nor is it the "new normal". The current situation is not normal, yet we try as try might to seek "normal". For work, even though people are all working remotely, even though they are all dealing with their personal issues regarding dealing with the virus, we are still asking teams to deliver as if things are normal.
So I reminded myself that this is not the new normal and thought I'd pass on that message to my team at work. I also thought I'd try and enhance my inspirational message with some historical inspiration. Where in time, besides the oft-cited Spanish Flue Pandemic, were people cooped up for months at a time. Valley Forge came to mind. They were cooped up there for an entire winter, right? That must have been like three whole months, right?
So, like I do, I looked up what I could about Valley Forge. They weren't there three months. The Continental Army was camped out there for six months! Dec. 19, 1777 - June 19, 1778. Okay, granted, they could leave their huts -- And it's a good thing they could since an entire squad of twelve enlisted soldiers typically shared a stone hut, sometimes with wives and children as well. Also, the winter wasn't as bad then as we were made to believe in elementary school. (Apparently the winter encampment two years later in Jockey Hollow was much worse and was the root for the myth of the horrible Valley Forge winter.) Still they suffered typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, influenza, pneumonia, and smallpox (because a group of the soldiers had not been inoculated the year before when General Washington ordered it), not to mention the starvation. (Yesterday, I ordered DoorDash from one of the local Mexican restaurants.) About 1000 of the 12,000 soldiers encamped there did not survive the winter. About 8% mortality.
Anyway, it could be worse... I guess. It wasn't exactly the inspirational message that I was looking for, so I decided to play it. Plus, what did those men have to look forward to? America lost almost every major battle for the next several years until Nathanael Greene took the fight to the Southern theater.
There is a battle to come for us, probably many. For Nordstrom there is going to be a much smaller pool of higher-end retail shoppers. We're going to be battling other retailers for those customers. For us as a nation there is going to be a battle of words over how and when to come out of this mess and get the economy going again. For many of us individually it is going to be a struggle just trying to get back to normal, to find jobs again, to restart some semblance of a social life, to just get back to a routine. One thing that I think this pandemic has shown us is that we accomplish much more when we can work together rather than apart. The phrase, "United we stand; divided we fall," comes to mind -- something to keep in mind.
