We humans have a curious tendency to want to study poop. It’s like we’re enrolled in Scatology 101. Some of us major in it. A few of us work hard to ace the final! The first day of class we take a piece of crap, examine it, turn it over and over, interpret it, then we turn it over yet again, write a report on its various permutations, meanings, aggravations, and the impact the turd will have on our lives. We do this till we get an appropriate response from another scatology student, a classmate who revels in the same mystifying tendency. Many of us do this scatological study every day of our lives. It’s sad, really, when there are so many more satisfying topics and much more rewarding majors listed on life’s curriculum.
It’s especially sad because we’re the highest form of creation. Human minds cured polio, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, measles, mumps, rubella, and scarlet fever. Human minds did that. Our minds took us, in 66 years ‘mind’ you, soaring over the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, to stamping footprints onto the windless surface of the moon. Human minds created Beowulf, the Book of Kells, the Gutenberg Bible, the Vitruvian Man, Stradivari’s violins and cellos, Dvorak’s 9th symphony From the New World, and Lennon-McCartney’s Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da! We’re the most creative, most significant creatures in nature. To my knowledge, no rabbit, rat, or raccoon has written a symphony or cured an illness.
But we demean ourselves studying poop. We conjure injury and damage where there is none. Instead of playing Beethoven’s violin concerto on a Strad, we honk a horn crafted by Ford at a driver in front of us going too slow for our liking. We revel in the ‘he said’ ‘she said’ during inane and hopelessly banal social gossip sessions. We judge other people instantly and authoritatively, despite knowing them for perhaps 3 minutes!
We occupy ourselves by defaulting to the basest, most infantile reactions when we feel aggrieved.
Here’s an example. Recently, I pulled onto a busy highway, where a motorcyclist felt I’d not given him room to maneuver. The poor guy immediately started writing his turd term paper, gesturing at me, yelling, pulling in front of my car and forcing me to slow down to avoid hitting him! I ignored his demeaning road rage episode, slowed down, let him vent, while pondering an appropriate reaction. Instead of engaging him — and I’m not boasting by any means, I’m a work in progress — I thanked the fellow for the reminder to look out better for motorcycles.
We inhabit a very tiny planet, spinning through dark, empty space. It’s estimated that 1.3 million Earths would fit inside the sun. We’re parked a few million miles from that sun, a mediocre star in a galaxy containing, at last count, roughly three billion stars. Cosmologists estimate that there are 3 trillion such galaxies. The Earth could implode tomorrow, blowing apart, scattering earth stuff thousands of miles into space. The explosion would cause two or three planets to adjust their orbit. The rest of the universe would never know about it. And we believe it’s important to study feces? Did we miss the memo, or what?
On the other end of the too-easy knee-jerk response is always a better one. Instead of peering at poop, we ought to try grasping for things found only overhead. As the late Carl Sagan once said, ‘we are star stuff,’ so let’s look upward for topics more worthy of our brilliant minds’ attention and energy. Let’s sign up for majors that make better use of our stellar minds. Let’s drop Scatology 101 and take Star-Stuff 530 instead.
