The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 66

Our True Colors

Everybody needs a haircut up in here. We've grown to a whole new level of shaggy. I caved and bought clippers and attempted to groom our muppet dog, but now he looks like a furry muppet goat with a beard. 

Sam has been planning to donate his hair, and this would be the ideal time to cut it. He's easily got a foot to donate. He looks like Janice Joplin. But I'm not going to risk marring his incredible gift by hacking at it with the kitchen shears. We'll wait. He'll wait.

I did get out the sharpest scissors I had and found a fine-toothed comb, nicked from picture day at the school, and attempted to trim both daughters' hair. Thankfully, they both have long, relatively straight hair. I didn't really have to create a "style." And, I mean, my handiwork doesn't look absolutely horrible. The girls don't look like goats. But I am definitely not a professional, and I will definitely be allowing the professionals --begging the professionals-- to take over once we are out of safer-at-home.

I just keep dying my own hair various shades of purple and randomly cutting an inch off of my ponytail when it isn't cooperating. And Michael is growing his first ever shaggy beard, turning into an absent-minded middle-aged hipster.

I grin as I sit in Zoom staff meetings and again as I watch the Flipgrid videos my students recorded for their project, at all of the emerging mullets and carrot tops and unintentional skater looks. Safer-at-home has become the great equalizer; our true colors are showing and we all look a bit unkempt.

Photo by David Anderson on Unsplash

Meanwhile, a gaggle of barbers met at the capitol, and 300+ people lined up for haircuts (or to carry their guns around, it's never quite clear). I'm not sure why barbers and hairdressers, protesting their own business closures, would then risk their lives and the lives of their clients, risk keeping the state locked down even longer, risk $1000 citations, risk jail time, and even risk losing their licenses, in order to make this point.  But "she's not my mom" was once again a common unifying theme, highlighting the maturity of this ongoing temper tantrum. In a true sign of patriotism, "One hairdresser draped patrons in an American flag cape," and in a true sign of racism, Owosso martyr Karl Manke compared complying with the executive orders designed to keep us from dying as similar to Jews in Germany, "willingly [getting] into those cattle cars." He's no gullible Jew, that feisty Karl. 

Of course, the governor wasn't even in Lansing today, because dams broke in Midland and 11,000 people had to evacuate. Their homes, their businesses, their cars: they actually lost those. They are underwater. Not in a metaphorical sense. Not in a "owe more on my mortgage than it's worth" sense. Not even in a "things are really tight right now and I'm afraid I might lose my business and I hate this and I want to go back to work" sense. Their homes, their cars, their businesses, their roads, everything they own: literally under water. 

87.5 miles away from the haircut party, people trudged through feet of water, carrying their dogs and their children and a backpack, desperately trying to get to higher ground. Flood waters flooded Dow chemical's containment ponds. Flood waters took out sections of US-10. Flood waters poured into five wastewater treatment sanitary stations. Flood waters wiped out the power for thousands. Instead of staying safer-at-home, 11,000 people are having to sleep on a friend's couch, crash at grandma's, sleep in a school gymnasium, find shelter, and figure out how to rebuild, now that they've literally lost everything.

But, by all means, let's get a fucking haircut.