Hairspray vs. Gel

As a child of the 80’s, I had to chuckle at where the spitting contest has gone between the governors of Florida and California. If anyone knows about hairspray and gel, we do. Anyone remember Aqua Net? It occurred to me that the dichotomy between the men and their states are perfectly summed up by their choices of hair products.

Gel coats every hair with exactly the level of control you choose. Lightweight gel allows for a fair amount of movement, but each hair inextricably comes back to the place your set for it when it dries. Heavier gel can act almost like glue, cementing each hair to each other in exactly the place you specify. Either way, the control coats each individual hair. It doesn’t matter all that much what the natural inclination of your hair is — Got a cowlick you don’t like? Gel will fix it. Want a mohawk? That’s possible.

You can get some of the same effect with hairspray but you really have to work at it. A really strong hairspray applied when it’s wet can do the same thing, but in general, hairspray is the last thing you put on when you’re done with shaping what the hair is naturally capable of. You can curl it with heat or tease it like mad, then spray it and it stays true to what you’ve done — but the spray is usually on the outside of the hair mass. It impacts the parts that are visible and on the outside instead of the entire length of every hair. In the 80’s my favorite thing about Aqua Net was that if you didn’t like where things were going, you could brush it right out. It didn’t hold quite as long, but if you got a good coat, you could pick the whole mass of hair up by one strand.

Nearly all of us ladies use both. If you like to turn your entire head into a bouquet of roses (and who wouldn’t!!!), you’ll need both and a whole lot of patience. Of course, that was before COVID. I’m sure hair products have been hit nearly as hard as lipstick.

Governments can take a gel approach or a hairspray approach too. A gel approach controls the actions of individuals or small businesses on a microscopic level. That’s what zoning was and it’s fitting that it was created in the late 1920’s, about the same time that hair gel came around. Very few Americans could afford either until after the war, which gave all of us time to get used to the idea. Zoning restricted what each individual property could do. At first the control was pretty general — even today, industrial still doesn’t fit well in residential areas, but as time went on, the regulations got more detailed and specific. Single family (high, medium, low density), multifamily, 5 levels of commercial, heavy or light industrial, the lists went on. I came into transportation planning in Florida’s gel stage: local land use decisions were scrutinized by state regulators annually resulting in massive deforestation due to paper use alone. If the project was large enough, adjacent jurisdictions got a say in how things went too.

By around 2011, the state’s landowners had enough. State oversight was pruned back to state interests alone — a hairspray approach. Even local development shifted to a Planned Unit Development (PUD) approach for many projects — a “come in and we’ll talk,” strategy for land development. If the rules didn’t fit well, then a developer could ask for a bit of flexibility here as a trade for other public benefits the local agency would never demand for an entire area. Sunshine laws were written to make sure the process was transparent for all — deals could be made for individual projects, but not in the back rooms.

California has taken a different tack. Most zoning decisions ostensibly remain in the hands of local counties and cities, as it does in Florida, but there’s an increasing layer of property level control that has been growing for quite a while. Local control has been pulled back to the state level for years in 4 environmentally sensitive areas (one includes the entire coastline of the state and another covers the entire San Francisco Bay region). Comprehensive plans are reviewed at the state level and urban growth boundaries are common and encouraged. Environmental regulations touch on nearly every type of potential impact and are state-level reviews. Coordination within regions remains a struggle (as it does everywhere) but that environmental review process requires nearly all projects to have a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) assessment. A 2017 Bloomberg article summarized research showing that California’s regulations are stifling their productivity, although it concluded that if they weren’t so strict, the rest of the country would be overwhelmed by their ability to attract people into mega-regions.

COVID regulations only brought this into clearer contrast. At first, both areas were pretty tightly buttoned up, but 18 months later, Florida has shifted to a personal responsibility model while California continues its top-down regulation strategies wherever it can. I’ll grant that you can probably find examples of gel and hairspray use on both sides, but the trend is fairly consistent. Is it any surprise that form based codes (zoning codes that specify more what an area looks like than what the internal business uses are) are products of Miami and Seaside, Florida?

So, what does God have to say about this?

I see examples in the Bible of some pretty heavy handed heart-level regulations that impact individuals, so I can’t say He’s completely anti-gel. Once it became a problem, He seems to condemn suburban sprawl and aristocratic parcel aggregation: “Ah, those who add house to house and join field to field, till there is room for none but you to dwell in the land!” (Ouch.) He’s also pretty happy about density: “Jerusalem is built like a city, that is closely compacted together.”

However, He tends toward more of a good shampoo and light hairspray approach overall. He wants the land to stay clean and exerts only minor control over what happens at a state (tribe) or regional level. Most of the land use and sale regulations in the Torah are more concerned about powerlessness than land use. There’s plenty of regulations and recommendations shielding the powerless from those that could exert control over them financially and almost no regulation regarding what is done on the property, with a few obvious exceptions for what He would consider spiritually noxious uses, mostly concerning prostitution or idolatry.

This stems from the fact that He never relinquishes ownership of the land. Those that hold the property do so in trust as stewards for His purposes. There’s a running theme of the land itself as the third party in all property transactions and land use activities. Faithfulness to Him and to each other imprints on the land positively. Faithfulness’s opposite, adultery stains the land and is regulated universally, both physically and spiritually. We all know places that we walk on that feel really yucky or great and have no frame of reference for why — this is part of it.

Environmental contamination is touched on with a handful of prescient health and safety regulations — several meat packing cities figured out the hard way what happens when massive amounts of blood are poured into water bodies. Otherwise, most issues were addressed at a local level, with land allotted to people on a family by family basis and local disputes settled by elders at the city gate in public on a case by case basis. You could sell your land, but not forever. You could sell yourself or your children to each other, but not for more than 6 years (or puberty for a girl, whichever came first). Unfortunately, by the time of the late kingdoms, many of the safeguards that would keep multi-generational oppression from occurring had been disregarded and things were getting out of hand — and God’s resulting judgments were pretty severe. You can’t mistreat the poor or weak for long without His intervention.

There are lots of ways that a hairspray approach can leave the weak vulnerable to oppression. The powerful have always had a knack for building their own power base on the backs of others. The neighborhoods that are the most vibrant and interactive are the ones with the least control. They may not have the highest value in the first 20 years, but they mature into really great places when the weak live alongside the strong in safety. I suspect the regulations that California is trying to enforce usually have great motivations, but without a local understanding of their purpose and the contextually appropriate way to enforce those regulations, the results are mixed. Sincerity isn’t enough to make a community work.

These days my own ‘do is more shampoo and ponytail than hairspray or gel. Anarchy is probably not a good final answer, but a little less control might do us quite a bit of good. Whether it’s gel or spray, both of them have to be washed out at the end of the day.