As Mississippi’s weather finally begins to catch up with the rest of America (oh Mississippi, you strange state, you), an onslaught of fall symptoms have begun to crop up all over campus. Girls trade in Nike shorts, tank tops and Chacos for leggings, scarves and boots. Starbucks trades in its ridiculously popular pumpkin spice latte for its ridiculously popular peppermint mocha. Stores trade in Halloween candy, decorations and knickknacks for Christmas candy, decorations and knickknacks, despite the fact that Thanksgiving hasn’t even come and gone yet. Am I forgetting anything? Oh, that’s right — the population of Starkville trades decent health for a wave of plague-like colds and stomach viruses thanks to punks who refuse to do something as simple as wash their filthy, germ-ridden hands.
     Don’t deny it. Don’t play games. Studies continue to show that at least one-third of American citizens refuse to wash their hands after using the restroom. Hilariously enough, the actual findings of a survey conducted by the American Society of Microbiology revealed only 67 percent of Americans wash their hands with soap and water, and yet 95 percent of people surveyed claimed they washed their hands every time after using the facilities.
    You know what would be easier? If people actually washed their hands instead of lying about it. Wouldn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t that lead to fewer colds and stomach viruses? Two-thirds of us hold up our end of the bargain and wash our hands, but what good does that do when there remains a renegade one-third that refuses to spend 15 seconds with some Dial and a faucet and thus destroys all of the sanitation barriers the rest of us strive to uphold.
    This is unacceptable. I, for one, am sick of getting colds, stomach viruses, pink-eye, Ebola, smallpox and the like from people who are too lazy to scrub their mitts after being in the bathroom (which is literally a cesspool of fecal matter. Or figuratively a cesspool.) Whatever, it’s disgusting, and it baffles me that people can’t follow simple guidelines that make life so much easier — and less germy.
    The real question is: why? Why don’t people wash their hands after using the restroom? Surely there must be some incredibly compelling reasons why an entire third of the population finds soap and water near their fingers an unsavory prospect. After doing some research — which means, essentially, reading some Internet articles — one theory kept cropping up over and over again that really caught my eye. That theory? Laziness. That’s right, the reason that honest, hand-washing people continue to get sick from their unwashed counterparts is due to people being unwilling to spend an extra 20 seconds eradicating disease. On some level, this should probably be surprising, but I’d say it’s about as surprising as finding out that Asia is, in fact, a continent.
   If the biggest reason why people refuse to follow the principles of basic common sense and essential rules of hygiene is due to laziness, then we can only resort to drastic measures. Perhaps we can start a force of “Sanitation Police,” armed with Germ-X tasers and bully clubs constructed out of hand soap. We can strategically place these special units in every public restroom on campus and allow them to forcefully scrub offenders with steel wool and dishwashing detergent until offenders begin to wash their hands of their own accord. And if those tactics aren’t extreme enough, how about lopping off the offending hand? Practical? Perhaps not, but come on now, those hands are filthy.