Men, Can You Please Just Wash Your Hands?
COVID-19 has made facemasks and vaccines regular parts of conversations and debates in seemingly every American room.
I support wearing facemasks and taking a vaccine (once it’s available) as efforts to help slow the spread of the virus. However, I understand that many people do not approve of either method, nor the uses of social distancing or widespread business and event closings.
That’s all perfectly fine with me, but there’s one thing that’s not.
I see men in restrooms, just about every time I go in public, who use a toilet and then exit without washing their hands. Can we please change that?
If you don’t want to use hand sanitizer for any reason, okay. If you don’t wear a mask because of your politics, I’m honestly annoyed, but whatever.
Just wash your hands. Are we seriously in such a hurry now that we can’t even be clean? It doesn’t take that much time or effort to clean ourselves after using a public restroom, or our own one at home for that matter.
In one of my former office jobs there was an employee who was known well for going to the bathroom and not washing his hands. Back then I felt like he was an exception. Now I’m not so sure.
I went into a local mall’s men’s bathroom the other day and saw two men walk out of stalls and out the main door without stopping at a sink. It made me mentally list all the other times I’ve observed the same scenario just recently.
Public restrooms are annoying and unsanitary. As technologically advanced as we’ve become, there are still so many surfaces we have to touch to flush a urinal, dispense soap (and I’m baffled when the soap isn’t automatic but the sink is) or dry our hands. It’s rare a whole restroom is fully hands-free.
But the reality is that, as the old saying goes, when we have to go, we have to go. And since that’s true, can we just take a few moments and wash our hands afterward? Don’t you want to be clean for yourself, if not others?
No matter what you believe about the dangers of COVID-19, can we just adopt some basic hygiene habits that will benefit our health whether we’re in a pandemic or not?
Matthew Tessnear is a North Carolina author who writes about mental health, food, history and sports from his perspective in the American South. He shares a regular series titled “What it’s Really Like…” here on Medium. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewTessnear.
