Ah, Sunday morning. The birds are chirping, it’s absolutely frigid and your bladder is full from the long night before. You clean yourself up as best you can and slip out to the bathroom. 

What you find: the remnants of a warzone. Remnants of toilet paper and gum in the sinks with various odd liquids splashed on the floor and near the mirrors. Inside the stalls, the toilet seats are encrusted with God-knows-what. There’s a good chance that something was left inside the bowl by the revelers of the night, and the toilet paper is probably touching the floor. Welcome to college, don’t mind the piss. 

See, here we enjoy many freedoms we may not have at home—the freedom to go where we please most of the time, the freedom to sleep when we want, the freedom to eat at whatever odd hour we desire (provided we acquire it during operating hours) and the freedom to do the stupidest things we can think of. Running down the halls in the early hours of the morning banging on the doors? If we haven’t experienced it, someone we know has. Public Safety being called on the hall because the crowd is too massive? If you have yet to experience that, then I envy you. Citations for alcohol? More than Bucknell will likely ever admit.  

But, is it not the price we pay? With the liberation of independence comes the inevitable overuse of that newfound freedom. It also comes with the responsibility to a community of your fellow students. You’re no longer judged by a superior parental figure but by a jury of your peers. While by no means is anyone required to have even a cordial relationship with those in their hall, I doubt most would enjoy dirty looks in the hallway whenever they pass by or even a general abruptness.

While it is the Bucknell custodial staff who are the unsung heroes of the general condition of the bathrooms, there are relatively few in number compared to the massive size of the campus. They cannot be everywhere all the time, and frankly, it’s rude to expect them to be. With the freedom of college should also come the responsibility to clean up the area you live in, or at least refrain from trashing it. Everyone can hope that one day, in the sought after future that only exists in our wild imaginations and fever dreams, college students who have barely entered adulthood will have the ability to handle that responsibility.

For now, however, we can just be thankful that the feces is usually restrained to the bathrooms.