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Only a few years ago, there was no such thing as "poop-scoop" laws. I remember thinking Kisilano would be overrun by dog shit, when I was walking around Vancouver in my salad years, but it took a while for that to sink deep enough into the collective conscience to make picking up your dog's fecal matter, a matter for the city to figure it had better do something about.
It's still not easy to talk about shit without being considered weird or blasphemous, in fact it's pretty amazing the extent to which excrement remains a taboo subject. If you call someone an a**hole, you've insulted that person in a way that once upon a time would have meant you had to show up at dawn, pistol in hand, ready to draw fire in the face of the person you had identified by his (surely a "he," no?) a**hole.
The absurdity of this is astounding. Mind-boggling. If you've ever encountered a person whose excretory system was so compromised s/he had to live with a colostomy bag attached to an abdominal beside-the belly-button hole like a giant condom for one of the ogres stalking the 'hood, sloppy shit leaking into it constantly all day and night until it gets so full it requires replacement with an empty one, you know how useful a functioning a**hole can be.
You really don't want to spend your whole life without having one in good working order. So why is it rocket science to recognize the usefulness of shit? Given the fact that you'll die if you can't/won't excrete, how can it be a mystery it's managed as a valuable resource by a considerable percentage of the world's population?
Looks to me like the fact that we're incredibly spoiled either has something to do with our attitude or else it's really got a LOT to do with it. "Style of class" - as jazz giant John Coltrane phrased it, is conscience-creating - or it ain't...
The "industrialized world" - as we like to think of ourselves, we middle class folk who can waste 10 gallons of pure drinkable water flushing away enough human fecal waste to methane-light all the streets of all our little neighborhoods, hasn't really been behaving very industriously. When your habits threaten to kill not just you but all the people you know plus all the people you don't know, doesn't it make sense to develop some new ones?
It's still not easy to talk about shit without being considered weird or blasphemous, in fact it's pretty amazing the extent to which excrement remains a taboo subject. If you call someone an a**hole, you've insulted that person in a way that once upon a time would have meant you had to show up at dawn, pistol in hand, ready to draw fire in the face of the person you had identified by his (surely a "he," no?) a**hole.
The absurdity of this is astounding. Mind-boggling. If you've ever encountered a person whose excretory system was so compromised s/he had to live with a colostomy bag attached to an abdominal beside-the belly-button hole like a giant condom for one of the ogres stalking the 'hood, sloppy shit leaking into it constantly all day and night until it gets so full it requires replacement with an empty one, you know how useful a functioning a**hole can be.
You really don't want to spend your whole life without having one in good working order. So why is it rocket science to recognize the usefulness of shit? Given the fact that you'll die if you can't/won't excrete, how can it be a mystery it's managed as a valuable resource by a considerable percentage of the world's population?
Looks to me like the fact that we're incredibly spoiled either has something to do with our attitude or else it's really got a LOT to do with it. "Style of class" - as jazz giant John Coltrane phrased it, is conscience-creating - or it ain't...
The "industrialized world" - as we like to think of ourselves, we middle class folk who can waste 10 gallons of pure drinkable water flushing away enough human fecal waste to methane-light all the streets of all our little neighborhoods, hasn't really been behaving very industriously. When your habits threaten to kill not just you but all the people you know plus all the people you don't know, doesn't it make sense to develop some new ones?
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