Going In Public

 SCI FI GREAT ROBERT HEINLEIN maintained that the degree to which a society is civilized can be measured by the cleanliness of its public restrooms. Accordingly, measuring American civility is particularly difficult by this standard, since public restrooms in the United States are a great rarity, rarer even than smiles from strangers on the street. I recall a friend telling me that while walking around on the streets of New York City as a tourist with his ten year old son he needed a restroom very badly, and ended up defecating behind a shrub on the sidewalk. He didn't get caught. his son was ostensibly not too emotionally scarred. I cannot count the number of times I have sprinted hastily into a McDonald's restaurant, smile at the cashier and said "I'll be right back", then made it into the restroom,just in time. Most Americans have surely had similar experiences, in our culture of privately owned restrooms only. Distinctly I remember the day my mom took me to register for the draft and get my draft card. When I get back to the car, shew was crouching behind the passenger seat, using a can, literally. I was eighteen, and already flustered by the horrible thought that I had possibly just signed up to be drafted and go to Viet Nam. seeing her in that condition only made it worse. "Get in the car and shut up" she said.I did exactly that. If an uncivilized culture is indicated by dirty public restrooms, we the American people are in sad shape. But what about barely having any public restrooms to begin with? Heinlein was silent on that issue, but he was presumably well aware of the general lack of public facilities all across the fruited plain in freedom's land. In America, we have the freedom to piss and crap our pants, or to wear diapers. We taxpayers pay for street lamps, stop signs, sidewalks, and numerous other amenities, but we either can's muster teh funds or don't care about public restrooms. This has always been the case in our private property obsessed society. We seem to follow Aristotle's criticism of socialism: "That which is owned by everybody is cared for by nobody". There is a certain truth to this, but we take it to the extreme, keeping our public money and cooperation at a minimum, in the name of freedom and individualism.Freedom and individualism are well well and good,but not when it reaches the point where millions of people are suffering in public, holding in what should never be held in. People are becoming more aware of this, ad public restrooms all over the country, what few there are, shut down because of pandemic fears. Hopefully when the virus is vanquished we can all come out of hiding, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and add a few boys and girls rooms to the mix.