Poop!

Yeah, you read it right.  Poop!  No, not Pooh; that’s a fictional character that has trouble dressing himself (if you don’t understand that allusion, e-mail me and I’ll explain it).

I engaged a young acquaintance of mine in conversation regarding her recent vacation.  As the sojourn was of a wilderness bent, I asked her, in hopes of generating some shock humor, if she had carried out her poop.

For the non-rustics out there, primitive camping (among other things) translates to no restroom facilities.  In my backpacking days, to answer the call to nature one dropped their backpack, grabbed their roll of toilet paper and hiked off of the trail.  Hidden behind some sort of vegetation for modesty’s sake, a hole was dug, pants were lowered, the squat position was assumed and there you go (literally).  The hiker buried the evidence as best they could and returned to the trail to continue the day’s trek.

Sometime after my retirement from backpacking, the rules were changed.  The official authority now requires that stool be packed out.  It seems that the increased interest in outdoor communion pushed the ecosystem beyond its capacity to integrate the human contribution into the soil in an efficient manner.  Testing of meadows and such demonstrated that human digestive bacteria was polluting the ground water and grazing leas.  Apparently, it is not to the deer population’s benefit to ingest feces tainted grass.

I will not share the answer that my question generated.  But I was surprised, taken aback really, that this question caused absolutely no anxiety; no nervous titter, no embarrassed blush.  In fact, we proceeded to have quite an in depth discussion of human evacuation practices and experience.  You just have to love the Millenials!

It seems that the heirs apparent to human culture skipped over the lessons on polite discourse and in so doing are rather uninhibited regarding most topics.  I am starting to understand the tattoos and body piercings.  I don’t particularly care for them, but I think I’m getting it.  Somewhere along the way, as we progressed form Boomers to X-gens to Y-gens to Millenials, the veneer of shame was stripped away and inhibitions disappeared.  The hippies of my youth (all burned out dope smokers now) were rank amateurs by comparison.

Let me make my point completely clear.  I am not criticizing the generation poised to rule the world in the coming twenty years.  Quite to the contrary, I applaud their sense of freedom.  Perhaps, with some of the walls of propriety breached, they will find the harmonies necessary for peaceful coexistence that have eluded us.  Or, maybe we won’t.

At any rate, I’m not going to live that much longer so if it turns out they chose the wrong path, I won’t be too much inconvenienced.  In the meantime, Millenials, I salute you: Just as long as you don’t poop on my grave.