Did you know that when men stand up to urinate that this “sends a fine spray around the room (as does every toilet flushed without the lid closed). Spray becomes vapor,which leaves a chemical deposit on anything surrounding the urinal. It can also change the color of wallpaper”? This interesting bit of bathroom trivia comes from a book by Rose George, entitled The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. (Reviewed by Dwight Garner, NY Times, 12/12/08)
Incidentally, German men are heavily into the sitting-down approach. And this doesn’t mean you are a girly-man, Gov. Schwarchenegger. Having raised two boys, I would say that sitting down is just polite and expedient.
The whole arena of human waste is a subject more delicate than sexuality (our own) or even money (our own), surely two of the biggest taboos in our culture. Why do we end up saying such ridiculous things as, “The dog went to the bathroom in the living room”? We don’t have the language, for one thing, to talk comfortably about these necessary functions. “Defecate” sounds awfully clinical and s___–well, I’m even loathe to write the word in a blog that will end up on the church web site. Maybe the language has never evolved because–well, we just don’t want to go there. And yet as George, a British journalist, points out, the average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet.
George’s book has its lighter side (well, the topic begs for humor), but when George becomes serious, she makes us think profoundly about this universal function. “Four in 10 people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways.” Just pause for a moment and meditate upon this simple fact–4 out of 10. That’s pretty close to half the planet, isn’t it? It makes one consider how fortunate we are every time we thoughtlessly flush the toilet and go on about our business.
Naturally, there are consequences for not disposing of human waste properly. George points out that children suffer the most–they die from diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by fecal contamination. She quotes from a sanitation expert, “Cholera and typhoid kill so many kids a year” that it “amounts to two jumbo jets full of children crashing every four hours.” We think of the outbreak in Zimbabwe. And cholera is not an easy way to die.
Something else we may not be so savvy about–George tells us that many sophisticated cultures don’t do much better than slum cities in disposing of human waste. Many coastal cities–she cites Vancouver and Brighton–simply throw it into the ocean. When this happens, she says, untreated sewage moves into sources of drinking water.
I note that they’ve done a re-make of the apocalyptic film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a film whose obvious message is that as a species we humans are too stupid and violent to survive. What will Klaatu, or some other visitor from outer space, say when he finds our planet in ruin and the people desperate? He will shake his head in wonder and dismay and think, “Who are these people who didn’t know better than to foul their own nest?”
