Poop Worshippers

Bill, our mortgage lender guy, shared an unusual perspective about how future societies will view our culture. He did not claim to have developed this theory, and I can only hope that he heard about it from David Letterman or some other late-night television comedian and not a late-night conspiracy theorist like Art Bell.

 

“Think about it,” he’d said. “A thousand years from now, when the archeologists uncover evidence of our lifetime, they’re going to be so perplexed. The amount of documents they find—the paper evidence of our culture—will decrease starting around 2003, and maybe it will cease entirely by, say, 2020. But you know what they’ll find an abundance of? Poop. Baby diapers. Cat-litter. Bags of doggie doo from those folks kind enough to pick up after their pets. All of it perfectly preserved in layers of plastic bags. It might even look ceremonious to the archeologists of the future. They’re going to wonder why in the world we’d go to such lengths to save the stuff. They’ll probably try to determine if it was religious, but all the records will be gone. Just like the mummies…”

Russ and I turned to face each other, and our raised eyebrows had a conversation.

“Am I dreaming all this?” my eyebrows asked.

“Get a load of this nutcase!” his eyebrows replied.

“Wow. I never really thought about it that way before,” I said.

Thank God we don’t have pets, I thought. And why wasn’t I better about those cloth diapers? Goodness knows we’d purchased enough of them!

Back at home, I surveyed our documents. No records? Ha! Our home is bursting with documents that I just can’t seem to part with. Let the archeologists make our address an excavation site. They’ll be able to track the trend of water and electricity costs back to 1999, at least. They’ll find notebooks filled with grocery lists, sermon notes, and consignment-clothing descriptions for the Big Sale. They’ll find toll-tag statements and gas receipts and fortunes from the cookies at Pei Wei.

I don’t want to hang on to all these things, mind you, but now I feel that I must.

After all, I don’t want the archeologists of the future to think we were a bunch of poop worshippers.