"...And Her Hair Turned White!"

If a person goes through a horrible or shocking experience, so the story goes, their hair can turn white overnight. Everyone I’ve ever talked to believes this. This is a scary, scary reflection on the American thought process, an example of the triumph of faith over experience.

No one can explain how it happens. That’s because, to be blunt, it can’t. There’s no biological mechanism. Visible hair is dead hair; the only way it can change is through outside agents like sunlight and bleach.

Ah, people break in at this point, it’s spiritual. It doesn’t need a biological process. Uh-huh. So how many people do they know whom it happened to? Well, it never happened to them. It was always a friend-of-a-friend or a distant relative or this guy they heard of in Acton.

Here’s a question: At least a few of your friends are bound to have been through something pretty damn awful. Did their hair go white? How about someone in your family? Did you ever see an accident victim on the news or on Court TV who had instawhite hair? How about pictures of refugees from war zones? Pictures of soldiers fresh from the front? Pictures of concentration camp victims, earthquake victims, plane-crash victims, victims of the Tower bombings? For God’s sake, if not a one of these people has hair which went white overnight, if not a single person you have laid eyes on in your life has hair which went white overnight, why on earth do you still believe that it can happen?