Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
In the past, I have written about the myriad of reasons people grow beards. Facial hair is grown in the spirit of male competition during “no-shave November.” Hipsters grow silly mustaches or even full beards for their ironic value. The best of us grow beards out of love.
But it seems beards can also be grown in protest.
Workers at Androscoggin Country Jail in Auburn are growing beards to protest the prolonged fruitless negotiations between their employer and their union that has left them working without a labor contract for more than a year, according to the Lewiston Sun Journal.
As county workers, the newly bearded dispatcher, jail guards and patrol officers are not permitted to strike. According to the Sun Journal, “the job action was called to vent some frustration.” Workers who cannot grow beards are rebelling by wearing jeans and polo shirts in place of their uniforms.
I am torn. On the one hand, I firmly believe that beards should be grown only for the purest of reasons: for the embrace of the masculine mystique, or as a commitment to the natural male condition.
On the other hand, whether the protest is just or not, the airing of grievances is one of the cornerstones of our representative democracy. In this case, the traditional last-resort method of protest — the strike — is unavailable. The workers’ beard growth and casual dress may not stop work altogether, but do disrupt the normal aesthetic of punching in and working.
The fact that under normal circumstances these workers are prohibited from growing beards also precludes these particular men from my normal practice of shunning the less savory motivations for growing a beard. After all, maybe Androscoggin County workers would always have liked to sport a goatee or Van Dyke. Maybe this is their first opportunity to do so.
Acting in concert is one of the more impressive and commendable aspects of the human condition. Seeing men (and women) act in unison out of mutual respect and solidarity gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I say that if beard growth is a way to keep these county workers together in expressing their employment angst, more power to them.
I am left, then, with a question: Which beard-growing motivations pass muster and which do not? I still hold that beards grown for vanity out of competition are unacceptable. I also still maintain that beards that are grown in the spirit of irony, that subtly mock true beardies everywhere, are similarly reprehensible.
That’s not to say all facial hair growth must be born of a higher purpose. There’s nothing wrong with a man growing a beard simply because it looks good on him, or to experiment with new looks.
One thing is for certain: the stubble displayed on the faces of the Androscoggin County Jail workers can be ranked among the most respectable beards recently covered by the Maine press corps.
Bangor Daily News