A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I gotta poo in Kalamazoo...

The town that Glenn Miller once memorialized as the hometown of "the toast of Kalamazoo" will soon be singing a new tune now that the woke city commission has decriminalized urinating, defecating, and littering in public streets.  One only has to look at formerly nice cities such as San Francisco and Portland to know exactly where that's going to lead: to people being buried in human waste.

For the past few days, whenever I need a break from the increasingly depressing news, I've been enjoying a rather charming book by Terence McLaughlin called Dirt: A Social History as Seen through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt.  It's a look at England after Rome collapsed, taking with it its extraordinarily high level of both civic and personal cleanliness.  For the next 1,500 or so years, England (and the rest of Europe) were filthy beyond modern imagining.

For example, in 18th-century London, one of the fastest growing cities in the world, the River Fleet served as a public latrine for some; for others, the street was the way to go (literally):

And if you did not live by a convenient river? Well, as always, there was the street. If you were out of doors, any corner or doorway could be used in emergency. The eighteenth-century citizen could not afford to be embarrassed by such an event, any more than his counterpart of the previous century, and many citizens followed the example of Sir William Fleetwood or Mrs. Pepys [i.e., using a convenient wall, corner, or archway). (Page 124.)

One of the miracles of modern urban planning was getting human waste off the streets and into sewers. In the same way — and this is a bit of useful information for the greenies who bemoan car pollution — automobiles were seen as the greatest miracle of the age, not just because they made transportation affordable for the masses, but also because they put an end to streets that were ankle deep in animal waste from the many horses and donkeys that transported goods and people.

Image: Kalamazoo, MI (screen grab from Bing maps; edited).

In the name of equity, though, it's clear that wokesters in city governments across America are determined to return us to a time of stench, diseases (dysentery, typhoid, plague, etc.), and parasites (you don't want to know) that many of us foolishly believed had gone forever.  In Portland, which was once a sparkling, clean Northwestern city, the homeless have spread across whole neighborhoods:

"I want to cry," Christina Hartnett, a resident, told KGW8." I just want my house back. My lawn is now becoming a public bathroom."

San Francisco briefly made the international news because of a new type of map available for city dwellers — a poop map:

Citing human waste reports made in San Francisco, software engineer Jenn Wong mapped the city's most poop-ridden neighborhoods, and it is a feast for watery eyes. Her project, called Human Wasteland, is pretty exhaustive, listing reports made by individual 311 calls from 2008–2015. If there was a frantic call made to city authorities about a steaming pile over that seven-year period, it's listed in Wong's map in the form of that ubiquitous poop emoji.

What's impressive is that the map predated ousted city attorney Chesa Boudin's announcement that he would no longer prosecute what he called "quality of life crimes."  San Franciscans, who have a high capacity for accepting woke pain that can be offset with virtue-signaling, finally gave Boudin the boot in June.

Now, undeterred by these West Coast experiments (or by history), Kalamazoo, Michigan has decided to go medieval on its own streets:

The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, has decriminalized littering, public defecation, and urination, despite various business owners decrying the policy.

On Monday, the Kalamazoo City Commission voted to water down some misdemeanor crimes so that they are merely civil infractions in the code of ordinances. Part of their reasoning was that people convicted of these crimes could have their lives negatively affected.

"One thing a lot of people don't realize is a misdemeanor is for life as much as a felony. So many things come with a permanent record on somebody's record," explained Commissioner Chris Praedel.

The commission voted unanimously to accept the changes.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article for American Thinker entitled "Regressives."  My point was that the Progressives had grossly misidentified themselves because they always looked backward, not forward, whether about war, race, or abortion.

With the Green New Deal and the push for decriminalization and decarceration, leftists are heading into a whole new era of regression.  Not only will we be sitting hungry in the dark, either bakingly hot or freezing cold, but we'll also be surrounded by mounds of odiferous fecal matter and puddles of rancid urine.  San Francisco, Portland, and Kalamazoo are just the beginning.