Nose hair is on a list of things we avoid mentioning in polite society. Most people think of it as an unneeded relic of our ancestory or as a defect in the design of our bodies. Medical people may tell us that hair in the nose protects us against environmental threats such as germs, fungus, and spores. But appearance usually trumps health concerns. The celebrities whose appearance we admire and emulate do not have nose hair showing.
I suppose you could trim nose hair by using a set of small, sharp scissors. That option is not appealing to me. I do not fancy sticking small sharp scissors up my nose and scissoring blindly. So I looked for something powered by batteries with an assurance of protection for my sensitive areas.
An Amazon.com search on "nose hair trimmer" will return 743 buying choices as of today. I have not tried all 743. But I have tried several, and I can put them in two categories. The first is a trimmer that trims effectively but scares the heck out of you and often grabs onto things and makes you jerk. It gets the job done but you are never comfortable with the way it works. You keep saying to yourself that there must be a better way, and back you go browsing through the 743 choices.
The second type of trimmer is the opposite of the first. It is comfortable and reassuring, but unfortunately it does not trim very well. Given a lot of time and persistence you may eventually do the job with it, but the effort is frustrating. You keep saying there must be a better way. And back you go browsing through the 743 choices. This could be an endless loop.
The dilemma this illustrates is common to our society in particular and our human condition in general. Consider the following:
- We want fast food that tastes fatty or salty or sweet, but we also want good nutrition. You can have one or the other, but not both.
- We want to think of ourselves as good and generous, but we practice greed and selfishness. It doesn't work both ways.
- We want good political leaders, but we don't want to be involved in the political process. Guess what?
- We want the services of government, but not the obligation to pay for those services. Keep looking and good luck.
- We want to be entertained by violent sports, but we don't want any players getting hurt. That isn't possible.
- We want clean air to breathe and water to drink, but we don't want and regulations that restrain corporations. You can have one approach or the other, but not both.
- We'd like a trim, athletic body but we hate to exercise or to restrain our appetites. How will that come out?
- We don't want banks that are too big to fail, but we don't want any restraints on business. Which will it be?
- We don't want politicians whose votes are for sale, but we don't support restrictions on giving them money. Go figure the outcome.
- We want our children to stand on their own two feet, but we insist on making their decisions for them.
- We feel guilty if we indulge ourselves, but cheated if we don't. And so it goes. And so it goes.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to deal with these dilemmas. But there is no perfect world. Or nose hair trimmer.
I am guessing I was twelve or thirteen at the time. My father was teaching summer school at what was then the Appalachian State Teacher's College in Boone, North Carolina. Dad and mother and I lived in an apartment on the second floor above the student center. My activities included tennis, exploring Howard's Knob and other nearby mountains, fishing trips, playing trumpet in a summer band, and working on my Boy Scout merit badges.
Lincoln knew this well, and he pressed for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (April 4, 1864) which completed the abolition of slavery in the United States. The vote in the Senate was 38 to 6. The vote in the House of Representatives was 119 to 56.
But what do you assume when you hear one of these alarms going off? Do you assume a robbery in progress and call the police? Heavens no. We hear the damn things so regularly that we hardly notice, much less doing anything about it. 
When I visited Guadalajara I was lucky to hire a private tour guide with his own car for a full day of looking around. I told him what I was interested in, and he took me there. He was a nice man who did accounting for the hotel and took people touring on the side. He took me places I would never have found or gone on my own, and I felt safe and comfortable being with him.
They stand on the long concrete lane dividers. As the cars line up, they walk slowly along holding their hand-lettered signs and sometimes a container for contributions. They watch for a window rolled down and an outstretched hand. Mostly the windows stay rolled up and people avoid eye contact. Sometimes they walk down the actual pavement between the rows of cars. There are men and women, old and young, many appearing crippled or otherwise impaired.
Some of the people passing by are religious, but they look the other way and pass on by like everyone else. Their "social issues" do not include this social issue. The mayor and bank president are greeted warmly in their church, but these street people would not be. They would be an embarrassment.
One day he decided he wanted a boat. He wanted a large boat to take his friends out on, several families at a time. They sell boats like that, of course, but he decided to build one himself. He had never built a boat, but he was a good welder (having done that for the Navy) and he believed he could figure it out. He read a lot about boat building, drew up his plans, built a large shed to build the boat in, bought a lot of scrap metal and other things, and began to lay the hull. He also build a wagon to haul the boat to the river with.
A Ridiculous Tree
You may have noticed that there are tall tree-like things appearing all over the landscape these days. They are not trees although they sometimes stand among trees. They are towers that hold the electronics to transmit our various signals for telephones, cellphones, television, radio, and who knows what else. They are shiny metal and easy to identify. And one of them can grow up almost overnight in a place there never had been one before. Sometimes they grow up from the ground and also they can sprout from the tops of buildings. They are not attractive.
I guess someone decided they could be attractive, though, and might be better accepted as part of the landscape if they were. I can imagine the discussion in some corporate boardroom now. Different people presenting their innovative concepts for how to make these things attractive. And the winning plan was . . . to disguise them as trees! Brilliant, right? We already have lots of trees, so who would object to a few more? This can even be considered an environmental beautification plan, like planting wildflowers in the highway medians.
Now you may think I am making this up, because it sounds so ridiculous. I would have thought I was making it up until yesterday when I was driving along a new highway in Montgomery County, Maryland. Off to the right I saw this tree-like thing, but not a tree. I could tell instantly it was not a real tree, at least not any variety of tree I had ever seen before. It did have sticking out things with green stuff on them like a tree, but clearly fake. And the top of this tree–a dead giveaway–held the same shiny metal relay equipment as those other towers we see everywhere.
When I was a Boy Scout, I earned the Forestry Merit Badge which required you to identify a lot of trees by name. Sometimes we had to identify trees just from a piece of their bark. I have always liked trees and a home surrounded by them. I hate it that developers often start by bulldozing their subdivision land and removing all the trees. Then they build these expensive new homes out there in bare fields. Not for me. I'll buy an older place with trees around it. And if I had a vote, I'd vote to outlaw the practice of killing off millions of nice young trees just to decorate and stand in our houses for a few days around Christmas. I was mad as hell about the State of California allowing logging companies to cut down almost the last of the Redwoods. I am tree-friendly, I guess.
The designers of the tree-disguised relay tower may have considered themselves tree-friendly also. They may have held focus groups where they showed pictures of their "trees" and paid people to give approval. They may have paid ad agencies to print slick brochures and plant advertising in strategic publications. They may have bought the votes of politicians for support.
We sadly live in a time when money can sell a lie for the truth, when money can substitute something fake for something genuine. We grow accustomed to advertising that is all about lying and fakery. A radio ad I heard the other day promised to eliminate your debt no matter what you owe or how much you earn. And some people will hear that and believe it, just as some people will accept these "trees" as trees.
Not me.