Disclaimer: I am a conspiracy theorist, so sometimes my ruminations will take me so deep down the rabbit hole that I have no idea how to crawl back out. For example, when I woke up this morning my web page was open to a CNN front page article about Adam Lanza. This is in the wake of the Florida State Library shooting, and tried to bring attention to the clear connection between mental deficiency and school shootings. My mind, on the other hand, started thinking about how the Lanza case tends to pop up every time people talk about guns in relation to a shooting, but disappears immediately after. I flash back to the work my students did on their ‘mythbuster’ papers and how one set of kids tried to convince me that the Lanza story was a complete fabrication and, for just a moment, I say hmm…
This piece isn’t about that possible hoax. This is about the ‘hoax’ of No Shave November (NSN). I haven’t shaved since the month started and my beard is about to where it can possibly be—which isn’t much. I don’t know think it looks very good. In truth I think the beard makes me look lazy, which is where the hoax comes in.
When I started the NSN, I wondered about my motivations. I only shave twice a month or so, and not having to do it at all felt like another thing being taken off my plate. It did not feel like I was giving something up or working particularly hard to bring attention to any issue or situation. Instead I was left with the impression that this whole thing is actually designed to let dudes off the hook of their responsibilities. Maybe it is. Maybe the whole thing is about the hair itself and when you see the men who haven’t shaved you’re supposed to connect the idea of cancer awareness to those men. I.e. These dudes are hip and real and do what they can to get the message out about prostate cancer. In contrast, the shaved men are not any of those things and or don’t give a dang. Only the shaved men outnumber the bearded few by a horrific scale. In other words, the message isn’t getting out there the way it should and is partly resulting in making us ‘not-so-long beards’ look really lazy.