Messenger: In St. Louis, potty politics are perplexing – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

They aren’t from when our children were little, but for her students. She works with special needs students in the Special School District. Some of them need help with basic life skills, like where and when it is OK to pee.

In St. Louis, that’s been a question the adults have been asking lately, specifically as it relates to people who don’t have a place to live. Earlier this month, St. Louis Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier introduced a bill that would decriminalize the act of peeing in public for people who are unhoused. It was part of a larger homelessness “bill of rights” that sought to elevate the humanity of our neighbors who have come on hard times and lack a roof over their heads.

Sonnier had bad timing. The bill was introduced around the time that the Rev. Larry Rice was encouraging a homeless encampment on the grounds of City Hall, where people were — yes — peeing and defecating in public. The political reaction was swift. No matter the good intentions, in a city that struggles with the image of its downtown as not always the most inviting place, allowing people to pee in public is a tough sell, even if many of the people criticizing had probably done so themselves after a long pub crawl in Soulard, needing to dip into an alley briefly because they just couldn’t make it home in time.

The politics of potty are perplexing.

For instance, potty made its way to the front page of the Post-Dispatch again this week, in a more positive spin, with a story about St. Louis County libraries offering Potty Training 101 classes for children. Indeed, some parents, and children, just need a little extra help.

That’s become a theme in St. Louis County libraries in recent years, with a little extra help offered to all sorts of folks, like those getting out of prison who need help getting documents like driver’s licenses or Social Security cards, or people who need access to court records to find out when they have a hearing. The libraries have been offering nights where lawyers are volunteering time to help people; and, in other cases, social workers.

And, sometimes, when they aren’t teaching kids about potty, the library opens its doors for a person who lacks shelter, who needs a place to pee.

The juxtaposition between two stories — politicians arguing over potty and librarians helping parents teach their children about the same topic — got me thinking about my wife’s flashcards.

She works with middle school children. Public schools don’t get to pick and choose the students who enroll. That means sometimes, there are students with severe disorders who have potty issues. My wife works with some of these. Some days she comes home frustrated when she’s had a tough day, in part because the flashcard training didn’t work. She is a better person than I am.

It takes a lot of humanity to deal with people — toddlers, middle school children, or unhoused adults — at their most vulnerable moments, and what is more vulnerable than needing help with one of the “p” words?

Our world could use some more humanity these days.

A bill to help unhoused people goes down because some folks don’t want to talk about potty.

Libraries and public schools become targets in culture wars as politicians battle over control of the restroom. It would be downright silly if it weren’t so serious, and there hadn’t been lasting damage done to the good work that happens in our public schools and our libraries as they have been used as pawns in a political battle that has us talking about all the wrong things.

So it is, too, as city aldermen debate homelessness by getting into political pissing contests over who’s a real progressive, distracting them, and us, from the more serious and difficult discussion about how they will invest in the shared resources that put more people in housing.

Our shared humanity is a beautiful thing, when we use it to make our communities better places.

Perhaps we need some flashcards about that.