The Citizen, 2015-09-24, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2015. PAGE 5.
Afew words about the toilet. Funny
word, that. It’s been around for about
500 years, but it hasn’t always referred
to a porcelain throne.
In the Middle Ages, it was a piece of cloth
ladies draped over their shoulders while
receiving visitors. Later, ‘toilette’ became a
dressing room, then the act of grooming –
‘making one’s toilet’. When they said that
Marie Antoinette had ‘fait sa toilette’ they
meant she’d been getting gussied up – not
down on her hands and knees with a lavatory
plunger.
Do you tend to gag when you hear that a
lady has sprinkled herself with eau de toilette?
Relax. It’s only cologne.
But back to the back-house. It travels under
a slew of aliases – Aussies call it the dunny,
Scots say ‘privvy’. It is also the head, the loo,
the outhouse, the WC, the jakes, the jacks, the
john – and for reasons known only to
Cockneys – the khazi.
Oh yes, and the crapper. Mustn’t forget the
crapper.
The invention of the toilet belongs right up
there with fire and the wheel. Before then we
had, well, holes in the ground, basically. Cess
pits where untreated human waste -- often tons
of it – Piled up and festered. Infrequently,
some poor sods had to bucket out those pits –
usually into the nearest stream. In 1821 an
observer noted that the River Fleet in
downtown London wasn’t very...fleet. In fact,
he wrote, “it is almost motionless with
solidifying (human) filth”.
Rodents, bacteria and ultimately infectious
diseases flourished.
Flush toilets, which appeared commercially
around the beginning of the 19th century were
not an immediate success. They frequently
‘backfired’ with results better imagined than
described.
Then a British plumber came up with a
miracle innovation – a flush toilet with an
elevated water tank. The plumber called his
invention The Marlborough Silent Water
Waste Preventer.
His name – gloriously -- was Thomas
Crapper. He should be living at this hour. Last
summer, world scientists showcased the latest
in lavatorial ingenuity at a Sanitation
Exhibition in New Delhi.
These are not vanity items for the rich and
pampered – they are innovations designed to
combat the global problem of poor sanitation.
Two and a half billion humans have no access
to anything like the bathrooms you and I use.
Every year, 700,000 children die from
diarrheal diseases. With decent sanitation most
of them would be alive.
But toilets aren’t just about sanitation, they
can actually pay for themselves. Some of the
innovations on display in New Delhi: an
American-designed power plant producing
150 megawatts of electricity – enough to
power a small city. It runs on human waste. A
British team showed off a miniature fuel cell
that can charge a cellphone overnight. It runs
on urine. Scientists from Colorado brought a
system that uses solar power to heat waste to
300°C. The process not only kills all
pathogens, it creates ‘biochar’, a charcoal-like
product that can be burned as fuel.
The lesson? Human waste is not ‘waste’. It
can revolutionize poor societies as an energy
generator and a money maker.
Thomas Crapper would be flushed with
pride.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
We live in an incredibly scary world
compared to the one that I spent the
first half of my life in.
From the time I was born in 1985 to 2001,
the idea of terror was a far-flung one for me
that consisted of mostly foreign countries and
foreign powers. The only exceptions to that
reality were from south of the border (like
Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski).
Events like school shootings, terror attacks
across the world and the crashing of planes
into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001 changed all of
that.
The world I grew up in was a sheltered one
and I have a great country and a great family to
thank for that. Unfortunately, not everyone can
claim the same thing.
Children are dealing with ideas that I never
did. They have classmates who may end up
bringing a gun to school and ending everything
and I can’t remember that ever even crossing
my mind when I was young. I never looked at
anyone in my class and had to consider
whether they were a threat to me. The worst
thing I had to consider was whether or not they
would beat me in Kick-across or soccer at
recess.
So I guess the point here is we don’t live in
the world that I grew up in.
We live in a world where we have to scan
people before they get on planes to look for
weapons. We live in a world where you have to
take your shoes off before you get on a plane
and we live in a world where death and
destruction are becoming every day
occurrences in much of the world.
I guess I should explain who I think “we” is:
We are the western world who didn’t have to
face these realities for the past few decades.
Anyway, we are guarded and rightfully so.
While metal detectors in school don’t
address the problem of students feeling so
alienated they think that gun violence is the
only way out, they do help to prevent another
Columbine.
While police monitoring social media for
predators or those who would hurt others
doesn’t provide psychological or psychiatric
assistance for those people who need it, it can
stop something dramatic from happening and
save a lot of lives.
We have given up a lot of liberties to provide
us with more defence and, right or wrong,
that’s the world we live in.
Whether we should or shouldn’t be opposed
to people prying into our lives to protect
people isn’t the point here. What is the point is
we live in a world where that’s a reality.
So, when a young boy (regardless of race)
shows up at a school with a metal briefcase full
of electronics and what looks like a countdown
clock, I think that a teacher being safe, rather
than sorry, is exactly the way that situation
should play out.
For those of you who aren’t following me,
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old student from
Texas built (or may not have built, the latest
news says it’s just an alarm clock he
dismantled and put back together in a
briefcase, but, whatever) a clock in a briefcase.
Good for him. He has the technical aptitude
that I wish I had. Bad for him for making a
poor decision in taking that clock to school.
Some people are going to claim that because
he was Muslim, teachers, administration and
the police over-reacted. In my opinion, if
anyone pulls out something that looks
suspiciously like a suitcase bomb, regardless
of whether they are Muslim, Christian,
agnostic, atheistic or Hindu, my first reaction
is going to be to run the other way and start
dialing 9-1-1.
Like I said, we are living in a world where
people bring guns to school, where planes are
turned into weapons of mass destruction and
where things that might have been the fodder
for bad action and spy movies of yesteryear
could be quite true now.
Sure, the suitcase clock lacked any kind of
visible explosive when it was inspected,
however, if it were me making the decision to
call the police, I probably wouldn’t have
wanted to look to closely or poke around
something that could explode. Even the
smallest amount of explosive material can
cause enough of an explosion to kill.
I think that the outreach to the young boy is
ridiculous as well.
Building a clock is impressive, maybe even
inspiring, however putting it in a briefcase and
bringing it to school? That’s not a decision that
should be applauded, it should be questioned.
Commending him and inviting him to the
White House is sending a message that this
kind of decision is okay when, really, it isn’t.
Bringing something that resembles a bomb
(even a cartoon- or Hollywood-style bomb) to
a school is asking for attention or trouble or
both.
As I often do, I’ll quote a piece of advice I
got that I often have trouble following myself:
If you can avoid a bad situation, do it, if you
are in a bad situation, walk away before it gets
worse.
The best thing that can happen when
someone brings something like that into a
school is that no one notices it and the builder
gets to take it home at the end of the day. The
worst thing is that a panic is caused and
someone gets injured, or worse, killed as a
result of it.
We’re not talking about a seven-year-old boy
who shapes his breakfast pastry like a gun and
points it a classmate here, we’re talking about
someone two years away from driving and a
few years away from voting. We’re talking
about someone who should have known better.
The race of an individual who brings a
bomb-like device into a school doesn’t matter.
Whether it was Ahmed Mohamed, Alexi
Markov or Alex Martin who thought it was a
good idea, the decision to craft, carry and
bring that into a crowded building was a
huge mistake.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Rights over rights
While I tend to think I’m a pretty
liberal, understanding person a lot
of the time, something always
comes along that shakes me back down to
Earth, such as it is, and shows me that I’m not
even close.
The latest such example is a court ruling in
Manitoba last week, where the Manitoba
Human Rights Commission set what is, in my
mind, a very dangerous precedent with the
case of Linda Horrocks.
The Commission concluded that Horrocks’
employer failed to accommodate her addiction
to alcohol and terminated her unjustly.
The woman worked as a personal-care-home
employee and was terminated in 2011. First, a
meeting was called between Horrocks, her
union and staff of the Northern Regional
Health Authority, her employer, to discuss
extensive absenteeism that was suspected to be
related to alcohol abuse. Horrocks denied that
consuming alcohol was causing her to be
absent, since she was under a court order that
she not consume alcohol, after being charged
with impaired driving.
A co-worker then reported Horrocks
smelling of alcohol, while another reported
seeing her intoxicated, after having signed a
commitment with her employer that she stop
drinking and Horrocks was subsequently fired.
Horrocks then filed a complaint with the
Commission and here we are today.
The Commission ordered the Health
Authority to reinstate the woman and pay her
the three years of salary she missed, as well as
an additional $10,000 for injury to her personal
dignity, feelings and self-respect.
In a statement, Horrocks reported that after
she was fired, she was damaged financially and
that she couldn’t afford “things we were
accustomed to, like cable or the internet.”
While the woman’s manager feared that her
condition would create safety concerns for
residents, the Commission stated that those
fears were not adequate grounds for dismissal.
The ruling stated that while patient safety
was an “important consideration” co-workers
should have done a better job of knowing
whether or not Horrocks was intoxicated or
not.
“I find the [Health Authority] did not make
reasonable efforts to accommodate the
complainant’s disability,” said Chief
Adjudicator Sherri Walsh in her decision.
Once again, it feels as though the problems
of the few are being allowed to trump the
needs of the many. If someone can be drunk on
and off the job and then cry wrongful dismissal
for being discriminated against for being an
alcoholic, we might as well all fold up our
tents and go.
Just the other day, I watched a documentary
called Love Child about the South Korean
couple who killed their infant daughter, after
forgetting to feed her due to their addiction to
internet gaming. The addiction was legitimized
in court and the father received a reduced
sentence of one year in jail, the mother no
sentence, as a result.
As I said, I feel I have a handle on the reality
of today’s workplace; what employers need to
do to accommodate those with disabilities or
different needs. But where does this end?
The next time you go to a hospital, or bring
a support worker into your home, will they be
drunk, as to not infringe on their rights? Will
those who drive for a living be allowed to drink
and drive, lest they be the victims of
discrimination?
It sounds stupid, but it feels like that’s next,
which is its own special brand of horrifying.
Other Views
Flush with pride, words on the toilet
I’m all for civil liberties, however...
“You're alive only once, as far as we know,
and what could be worse than getting to the
end of your life and realizing you hadn't
lived it?”
- Edward Albee
Final Thought