Waiting for a trim

They tell me I’m starting to look like Donald Trump … from the ears up, anyway.

Yeah, there’s no denying that the thatch atop my noggin has grown well out of control. Morning finds me with world class bed head; a rat’s nest, my dear mother would call it, and despite determined efforts to tame the tangle, the top of my head comes off looking far more presidential than I’d care it to be. But looking about, I hardly feel so all alone. Above the face masks, most folks I see have adopted the Neanderthal look, a fashion that I suspect shall remain in vogue so long as salons and barbershops are shuttered as we wait for life to get back to normal.

“Get back to normal.” We hear that a lot. Haircuts. Cheeseburgers. A beer with the boys. We wish to get back to life before distancing; when we weren’t sheltering-in-place. Wishing we could get back to when things were … well … like things were.

With the virus still spreading, the economy sinking, and life less certain with every day, who wouldn’t wish for the return of the comfortable routine. Still, even in the midst of the pandemic, maybe we should be careful of what we wish for.

Perhaps, before we rush willy-nilly back to what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted, we might want to give a little thought to that. It’s interesting how one of the catch phases that have bubbled up during this viral crisis is “essential employee” with emphasis on “essential.”  It was more than 200 years ago that Samuel Johnson observed that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” and it has been our experience that the prospect of mass mortality has much the same effect on whole nations. In a matter of days we were able to sift out what things needed to be done and which could be indefinitely put on hold while we hunkered down in the face of the spreading disease.

I believe it was Churchill who insisted, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” For individuals and families, the impact of this virus has ranged from annoying and distracting to tragic and disastrous … with most of us landing somewhere in between. It’s been more than six weeks since we last mingled freely … going to the movies, hanging around in bars, sending the kids off to class on a weekday morning. Day after day it’s seemed that chunks have been taken out of our lives … trips postponed, celebrations canceled, plans put on hold. We’ve had burials without mourners, deaths without family, illness in isolation. We’re lonely and sick of each other all at the same time; wanting to get out, but unnerved by what might be lurking on the handle of a gas pump or the breath of a friend. We’re told we’re all in this together, and yet, we’re all dealing with it alone. And day by day, one by one, we’re oh so ready for it to be all over.

But it’s not.

This is a health crisis. We’re dealing with a virus and to do that we need science and medicine, not politics and partisanship. The only rights really being threatened here are our rights to life and health and the threat is from the virus. This pandemic has been compared to a war, and in a sense that is appropriate. Wars are difficult, demand sacrifice and are not easily won. Wars are measured in years, not days, not weeks, not even months. If this is a war, we’re only at the beginning … the initial battles, the earliest round of sacrifices, the first casualties. There are more to come.

No matter how we wish otherwise, haircuts may have to wait.