I’ll vote for whoever will get the bathrooms open

Access to restrooms offers a glimpse into the successes and failures of society. When a store no longer thinks it’s “safe” to keep their restrooms open to the public, to the customers, then we have a problem.

I was just in the grocery store and I had to pee. I went to the bathrooms and found three doors labeled, Men, Women, Family, all required door codes to get in. They all also had signs posted that read “No Public Restrooms.”

Well I had a cart filled with close to $100 worth of groceries. Clearly I’m not the “public” in this sign.

But when I went and asked the cashier for the code so I could use the bathroom, I was told “there are no public restrooms.” I had left my cart by the bathroom and came to the cashier empty handed, so surely she assumed I had just come in off the street.

I told her my cart was by the bathroom. She said “I understand, but there’s no public restrooms. I’ll call the manager.”

The manager came out of the back to greet me. “I’m sorry we don’t have public restrooms,” she said. To which I replied I’m not the public, I’m shopping here, and you very clearly have three restrooms that could be used.

“I’m sorry,” she reiterated, “it’s for our safety.”

I’ll save you the rest of the story other than to say I was fucking pissed and I didn’t get to go pee.

All across the country now you’ll see signs that read “No Public Restrooms,” the last like of defense for store owners looking to keep homeless drug addicts from soiling their bathrooms or camping out in there.

Rather than addressing the issue, that more and more people in this country find themselves addicted to drugs and living on the streets, we do things like close the bathrooms.

Now this might seem like a trivial thing, or something that only “privileged” people get to complain about, but the truth is it’s a symptom of a much bigger issue in our society. An issue that NO ONE in any position of leadership cares to address. It doesn’t impact them, so why fix it?

It’s the same type of symptom that forces working class people who take the bus to their job to stand and wait at the bus stop because some homeless drug addict decided that bench would be their new home.

It’s the same type of symptom that allows 40 percent of food in this country to go to waste, while 44 million people suffer food insecurity, millions more suffer nutrition insecurity, and families are forced to wait outside inline just to get food.

It’s the same symptom that actually forces whole stores to shut down in communities.

I’m so sick of the nonsense battles that politicians play. Abortion. Gun rights. The border. They pretend like those are the battles they’re taking on and they do a good job of recruiting people to argue for them. Meanwhile those “issues” never get resolved, and the population is distracted as the country rots from the inside out.

When I was in high school I remember the platform that the student president often ran on was: getting paper towels in the bathroom and getting rid of those paltry hand dryers (this is before Dyson got into the hand drying business).

It’s the little things that matter. That’s why I’ll vote for the candidate who says they will get the bathrooms open. Because to get the bathrooms open means addressing the growing incidence of homelessness and drug addiction, as well as safety for people working in the stores.

Everything else is just nonsense.