Randy!
Randy walked into the barber shop where we get our hair cut last Thursday and sat there quietly and attentively awaiting his turn in the chair. We watched him as we people watch so many as he sat there. He was young and seemed a little over eager for his age and he seemed to be concentrating very hard on everything including the money that he held in his clutched hand that was to pay for his haircut. We sensed that something wasn't quite right about him.
When his turn came for his appointment which was ahead of us he went very deliberately to the chair and asked my barber friend if he would wash his hair for him before he started to cut it. My barber has a wash station but seldom uses it on male clients and we selfishly wondered why this kid was wasting everyone's time with this wash job. When he was finished with his hair work, my barber asked the young man if he wanted him to call his parents to come and pick him up. He replied that he would be walking home this rather pretty late winter day
When my turn in the chair came I asked the barber, who is an old friend, why the kid needed to have his hair washed. He replied that this sometimes happened with no real rhyme or reason to any of it, as was much of Randy's world. Randy was the product, you see, of two crack using parents that had left him, at birth, with no real advantages or options as to a future that would not be dependent on the kindness of others to see him through. He had been adopted by a family in the town where the barber lives and works and they saw to his needs and gave him a comfortable home and the deep understanding that a child man like this will need for the rest of his life.
It is tough to watch something and someone like this knowing that they were the victim of a society that included ruining their future before they ever left the womb. Randy, not his real name, will never be anything more than he is and requesting a hair wash is the least that we as a nation could do for him.
As we write this piece we are reminded that the neoconservative and very harsh minded Republican party is pushing every day to cut back and eventually eliminate all the help that might be available for all of the Randy's in this world that they look on as able bodied who really have no way to cope except for the very generous help extended to them by others who have some compassion in their souls. What will happen to all of these products of a screwed up society who do not have loving homes and are dependent on the state to give them some measure of a life when the Republicans are through with what they have in mind? Are they, like one Republican congressman in Indiana said recently, just to “wither away and die”? And, for that matter, is that is what is to happen to all of us who are not rich when we are of no further use at the end of our working lives when we, ultimately, have no pensions or social security or accumulated savings from inadequate lifetime salaries to see us through? As another Republican congressman from Alaska said recently, perhaps then it will simply be time to turn us over to the wolves.
Happy St. Patrick's Day to all!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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