When I opened up my email this week, a T-shirt company to which I had been a loyal and reliable customer over the past 20 years confronted me with a haunting consumer milestone:
“Do you remember the first T-shirt you ever bought from us? We do!” And there … as I scrolled through the email’s hopeful and nostalgic sales pitch … past a graphic littered with colorful illustrations of several now-defunct artifacts of technological advances … compact and floppy disks; film canisters; VHS tapes, and even some tech dinosaur holdovers, like cordless phones and desktop computers …. There it was …
A picture of the first silly t-shirt I ever bought from the interwebs.
It read:
“Everyone Poops.”
Mind you, this had nothing to do with the children’s book of the same phase by Minna Unchi, but rather it was a silly riff on the similarly implied understanding of our shared humanity.
Of course, I remembered the purchase immediately.
Just above those two little words were the silhouettes of an elephant and a donkey facing one another; their figures were bisected by a single, slender stripe and a few stars. Under the animals’ hind ends were two jaunty, swirl-topped piles to punctuate the scatological point that a different way of looking at each other could potentially heal our deepening political divisions.
The shirt was baby blue and its design was silk-screened in a decidedly healthy bowel-movement-colored brown.
The year was 2008 and my husband was the recipient of that particular piece of nostalgia.
I remember how we laughed at our Election Day plans for that shirt.
The moment WAS historic. It was the first Tuesday in November and our new little family of four was headed to the polls.
The shirt seemed like a safe, albeit cheeky choice. No one would accuse us of electioneering when my husband, standing in front of the polls with our year-old son straddling his hip, opened his coat to show the slogan as I snapped a picture before the two of them disappeared behind the curtain to pull a lever.
How hopeful we were. How unified we expected to be.
Back then we didn’t really think the Constitution was just filled with words to be twisted into something as ugly as what we are seeing from our nation’s capitol on a daily basis.
The picture is as clear to me now as it was then. What is fuzzy now is the warm feeling of looking forward to good change. ... humanistic change. The promise of our nation moving closer to the goal our founders set for us to be more perfect.
Instead, we seem to be in a race to destroy it all.
All those quaint ideas ... like Voting Rights, Women’s Rights, a government Of and for The People, and the Rule of Law.
Eroding day by day.
Until all that is left is that stupid t-shirt … with its empty slogan, as defunct now as all the CDs Columbia House once made us believe would last forever, and a stalker-y sales pitch from a company that has been tracking my every purchase.
What seems so very clear now is that we are not the same.
We may all poop, but only one of us – the one with the extended probosci – seems to revel in smearing it all over the hallowed walls of government.
And that is the Elephant in the room.