Was This Us?

A note on our global legacy

Old things become fresh again when you revisit them after a long absence. Take the simple icons that tell you in any airport, indeed in any public place in the world, where it’s ok to relieve yourself.

I need to go.

Where can I go?

Oh, over there, toward the sign with the humans on it.

That is where I can go.

I had not been in a European airport since the pandemic. This May, a magazine assignment about a Greek archaeologist roused me from my stay-at-home-ism and sent me on a two-leg flight to Crete. And so, in Munich, while transferring to my second leg, I reacquainted myself with all our antiseptic assumptions about what we want, how long we should spend in any given space, and how we can most efficiently be moved from place to place. Rising from my generic sandwich and my generic coffee and needing to address certain generic needs, I was struck dumb by the fact that when looking for the bathroom one need only look for the humans.

Maybe it was the archaeology story I’d been sent to report. Maybe it was the post-COVID seeing of the world afresh. Whatever the cause I found myself thinking that if alien visitors were to uncover the ruins of our civilization some hundreds of thousands of years from now, it’s totally plausible…