My mother gets the AARP Bulletin, and in the one for June, 2012 (Vol. 53, No. 5), there is on the very last page (inside the back cover, actually) a piece that covers their predictions for what ubiquitous things in our daily lives will no longer be around in 50 years, and one of the things on this list was toilet paper (!). Well, I hope that's not true! I simply cannot see a world in which we have outgrown the need for toilet paper sufficiently for it to become extinct.
The Bulletin claims that in the future, everyone will have bidets (for those of you who don't know, they are the little things that look like toilets and have a sort-of upside-down shower head that sprays water up at your butt, etc.), and we will all wash ourselves to perfect cleanliness. (Maybe this is why all those futuristic movies have people wearing all white?) But what if you have an accident away from your bidet? (Maybe we'll all have portable, collapsible bidets we carry around in our pockets that suck the moisture out of the air around us?) And more to the point, what about the practicality of the bidet in places where water usage is restricted? Where I live in Los Angeles, we have horrible shower heads mandated by law that limit the amount of water flow to barely a trickle such that everyone is walking around itchy and miserable all day, and with horrible rashes on the backs of their necks due to the inability to completely wash the shampoo out of their hair: it's truly ridiculous, and for someone with skin allergies, it's actually horrific! So now imagine this being imposed upon the bidet, and without the luxury of toilet paper even existing anymore (!!). Need I say more? (I don't really need to elaborate, but as usual I feel compelled to do so, somehow.) Everyone would stink to high heaven and itch all day long, and life would be far more disgusting than anyone would enjoy tolerating. (But this is the world of the future, with strict government-mandated water-conservation regulations for everyone except those who make the laws.)
But hey: Maybe I could make a fortune designing and selling the nose-plugs and/or the scuba gear-like personal breathing apparatuses of the future to block/mitigate the stench!
But, oh, horror of horrors: whatever will high school students use to decorate the trees of their enemies in the future? There will always be a market for this product for just such an application as this type of prank, and so long as it remains profitable, I predict toilet paper will always be with us. (Unless the Democrats ban it in the future in some misguided environmentalist push, in which case their Republican opponents can retort that we will all be able to smell how bad the policy stinks immediately upon its passage and implementation.)
Oh, and another thing: Why is the AARP Bulletin predicting this stuff for senior citizens? They're not going to be around in 50 years anymore anyway, so they'll never know whether or not these predictions are correct whatsoever. Or maybe that's the whole point: to provide predictions to people who could never find out if the writer is a foreward-thinking genius or just a foolish wild-guessing dolt.
