Have you joined the latest campaign on twitter? It involves posting a picture of your head, without a hat, to focus on the over 1 billion people in the world who are forced to go hatless due to their poverty.
It’s part of a charity drive to raise money to buy them hats. Won’t you please help raise awareness?
After all, wearing a hat is an important sign of civilization and sophistication. Many of these schools even have dress codes for the kids to go to school, and how can you learn unless you are properly dressed? And a hat is just what is needed to complete any ensemble.
This picture shows just the sort of thing that is needed.
Just the Hat You Need
Oh, occasionally, the Pope will go hatless to demonstrate solidarity with the poor.
Hatlessly Humble
But even he realizes how important a hat is at all times. Here he is wearing the cranial equivalent of flip-flops.
Lightly Hatted
But hats are important for health, too. After all, if you are hatless when it rains your head will get cold and wet, which leads directly to a cold or flu, which could even progress to pneumonia. That’s why it is so important that we start shipping hats to these impoverished people.
They are also in places where their heads are their first line of defense against an oppressive sun. A hat can really help protect against sunburn, and it’s a lot cheaper than sunscreen.
But it is the infections where donating these hats really work. Many of these places have infestations of botflies.
Botfly Infestation
[Photo from here.]
How else can you keep them out of your head that with a hat?
And look at this poor, homeless waif.
Bird Droppings
Bird droppings carry a whole host of diseases. These sorts of kids have to go to school, going hatless sometimes for 5 miles or more, all the while subjected to birds going on their heads, subjecting their crowns to the sun, and sometimes even getting wet.
Surely a charity campaign to donate hats to all these people is extremely important. Isn’t it the least you can do?
I’m doing my part. Here is my more normal selfie:
My Selfie
But how can I demonstrate my solidarity with a photo like that?
Here is my #hatlessheadselfie.
#hatlessheadselfie
How can that do anything but generate pity in the eye of the beholder and really make them want to take action?
Of course, the real campaign is #barefootselfie, which you can read about in Have YOU posted a bare foot selfie yet? Photos of feet flood the internet to raise awareness of those forced to go without shoes every day, New Barefoot Selfie Campaign Aims To Spread Awareness For People Without Shoes (Photos), and #BarefootSelfie campaign brings naked feet to newsfeeds. It’s promoting a walk in Nottingham for a Shoe Aid charity event.
I’ve written many times before why such charity is particularly stupid. There is nothing wrong with bare feet; it is only in the western world that we’ve let our feet atrophy to the point where we think that a foot needs assistance. If an area has sanitation problems that lead to things like hookworm, the correct solution isn’t shoes, it is fixing the sanitation, particularly since that same lack of sanitation contaminates the drinking water. Work instead, and spend the money on, getting proper privies.
And walking barefoot to school is no more of a burden than doing it shod. If you go barefoot all the time your feet can handle it just fine. The problem though, is if you suddenly start wearing shoes, they’ll weaken your feet. And when the shoes fall apart, now you have to walk barefoot to school with feet that can’t handle that any more (though they’ll toughen back up again within a week).
Donating these sorts of items also ruin local entrepreneurs and put them out of business. This whole idea is just more western arrogance.
And here’s the really stupid part. Here’s the webpage for the campaign: #Barefoot Selfie Has Started. This is what they say under Why Walk Barefoot?.
Aside from the numerous health benefits associated with walking barefoot, The Barefoot Walk was conceived to draw people’s attention to the fact that there are millions of people around the world today who have no choice but to walk in bare feet.
By walking with us at The Barefoot Walk, you are helping to raise money and awareness for those less fortunate than most of us here in the UK. And it’s good for you!
That is followed by a very long paragraph with the benefits of walking barefoot:
Walking barefoot results in a more natural gait. People who are used to walking barefoot tend to land with the forefoot or mid-foot, eliminating the hard heel strike and generating much less collision force in the foot and lower leg. A 2006 study found that shoes may increase stress on the knee and ankle, and suggested that adults that walked barefoot may have a lower rate of osteoarthritis, although more study is required to elucidate the factors that distribute loads in shod and barefoot walking. A 2007 study examined 180 modern humans and compared their feet with 2,000-year-old skeletons. They concluded that, before the invention of shoes, humans overall had healthier feet. A 1991 study found that children who wore shoes were three times more likely to have flat feet than those who did not, and suggested that wearing shoes in early childhood can be detrimental to the longitudinal arch of the foot. Children who habitually go barefoot were found to have stronger feet, with better flexibility and mobility, fewer deformities like flat feet or toes that curve inwards, and fewer complaints. Walking barefoot enables a more natural gait, eliminating the hard heel strike and instead, allowing for a rocking motion of the foot from heel to toe. Similarly, barefoot running usually involves an initial forefoot strike, instead of on the rear of the foot, generating smaller collision forces.
So, think about what they are saying. Walking barefoot is so beneficial that we are raising money to try to deprive poor kids from getting those health benefits.
Yup. That’s what they are saying.
I despair of anybody ever really thinking any of these things through.
It seems to me we might have some fun with our own #hatlessheadselfie twitter campaign. Why let them have all the fun?
Ahcuah 
Bob, I am disappointed with your short-sightedness. The problem is not people without hats, but people without gloves. The hands are what people use every day to accomplish their basic tasks. Hands are vulnerable to all sorts of malicious dangers constantly. People who go without gloves are lacking palm support, which is essential to manual health. It is important that people go everywhere with their hands covered by a very stiff piece of leather which is tied tightly to the surface of the palm. Without this, impoverished people run the risk of collapsed palms, calluses, and fingernail sensitivity. Please re-think your campaign. And think of the poor gloveless people.
Next crusade will be to send candy and other junk food to those poor people in places that only have fresh whole natural foods available to eat. Imagine all these “poor” people suffering without our diet-related modern ailments, like; heart disease, type 2 diabetes (that’s right, even if you aren’t born with type 1, you can at least do your best to acquire type 2 – it’s a sign of status and too much wealth), and cancers, many of which depend on us eating really nasty foods that simply don’t exist in nature. So let’s help these poor people acquire the status symbols that we hold true and dear in our gluttonous culture.
P.S. it’s also really good for the economy of disease researchers, doctors, drug companies, etc..
Hah, yeah. I think the glove thing is a good idea. Or corsets. Lets send them corsets. We are already doing skin-whitening cream so maybe now we should have a national tan day?
Well, I bombarded the place with a few comments. I hope at least somebody reads them….
You can see some bunions developing in some of the barefoot selfie pictures.
To add on to the fact that there are many photos showing big toes pointing badly inwards, it’s interesting how it makes those feet look bad. Yet the predominant cultural attitude is that pointed toes on shoes look sexy and attractive. Why is that?
I’ve been wondering some why it is fashion favors the idea of shoes that bring the toes to a point, why is it shoes didn’t develop with wide toe boxes? Was it a question of economics and ease of manufacture, which then drove the fashion towards the pointed toe? Was it something else?
It’s all very strange and I haven’t been able to think of anything that caused the development of shoes where the toe box pulls the toes in upon each other.
I have registered to attend this event and offered my services as a volunteer, but have been umming and ahhing about whether I really want to go, for the reasons you state above. I’ve told them I want nothing to do with the shoe collection and that I don’t agree with it. They are raising funds for many other charities on the day. My heart is telling me to go and have fun and maybe tell a few people there that barefoot is good and lack of shoes is really not an important issue, but my head is telling me that it is all going to be rather sad and I would probably be better staying away. Quandary.
Paul, I’d say go ahead and do it. Looking at the page, Shoe Aid is not the only charity—the others look better. Maybe you can use your presence to educate others about the inadvisability of Shoe Aid and the incongruity between their “Health Benefits” and yet trying to get shoes on their kids. And maybe point them to Peepoople as an alternative for next year.
I had a a conversation with them on thier Facebook page about this. I’m still not entirely satisfied, but it seems they’ve given more thought to this than their website would suggest. https://www.facebook.com/BarefootWalkNottingham
Honestly, we need to educate them. We need to point to the very pictures they are so proud of an tell them they have a problem.
I saw this idea being propagated awhile back with a pic of a poor villager’s feet wearing crushed water bottles fashioned into flip flops…?! Obviously a regression from the barefoot way, Thats domestication for ya
Just getting directed to this post. In Dr. Phil Maffetone’s latest book, he has a chapter titled Feet First. The quote opening the chapter reads, “Shoes do no more for the foot than a hat does for the brain” from Dr. mercer Rang, legendary orthopedic surgeon and researcher in pediatric development. Loves it! -TJ