From the Helm – Editorial by William

A new year and a new crisis

As we go to press, the COVID-19 virus is sweeping the world. The news is finally moving from election noise to a different crisis. The science fiction stories of my youth are now slowly acting out as a global pandemic. Ah, we are blessed to live in interesting times.

People are hunkering down for the long haul. This is going to be one tough year for everyone, rich and poor alike. Viruses do not discriminate. For that I am thankful. A small thing, and a little strange to say. But a shared pain is better than a pain that may be ignored by the ruling classes of the world’s governments. When the Senators son’s no longer go to war, war is no longer feared.

It is my prayer, that the upside of this crisis will be families coming closer together. When bad times hit, the ones who band together, who care for each other, make it through the bad times. The romantic image of the lone wolf is deep within our psyche, but the reality is, the band of brothers, family or tribes that work together are much more likely to pull through.

As we have seen on the news, businesses are pulling back. SOUTHWINDS has already been hit with reduced advertising budgets. Emails and phone calls have come in telling us they have no choice but to cut their expenses. The businesses that keep the lights on here at SOUTHWINDS are cutting their budgets. We’ll have to adjust, and the future is unknown. With the loss of income from our advertisers, we are going to be several thousand dollars short of our production costs this month. Our current thinking is we should suspend production of our print magazine until the late fall while the economic issues are resolved. The later months of 2020 should give us time to recover and regroup so we can continue to produce the magazine.

In the meantime, we will move to a digital copy of the magazine for the May edition. If our advertisers agree, we will keep producing an online version only. We have done this for many years. This path depends on our advertising partners agreeing to the move. Stay tuned on our web page at www.southwindsmagazine.com as this crisis unfolds.

What is known, at least at this point, is the world will keep turning and the sun will come up tomorrow. At the same time, some families will suffer personal losses in the coming months. For that, you have our heartfelt prayers. Together, we can withstand any storm. May the Lord bless you and your families in the coming struggles.