World Toilet Day is not just another crappy holiday

From an excellent blog I follow, Timothy Taylor’s Conversable Economist, I read his article about World Toilet Day.

Yes, every day is some kind of observed day somewhere in the world promoted by someone, but World Toilet Day is not just another crappy commercial holiday. It’s about a serious problem, which is that 15 percent of the world population still lives without proper sanitation. Open sanitation, especially in densely populated areas, is a cause of much serious illness (especially to children, who are especially vulnerable). So I’m happy about the invention of World Toilet Day in 2001 by the World Toilet Organization global non-profit. It’s curious that I hadn’t heard about it for thirteen years, but I’m grateful Timothy Taylor pointed it out in his blog. Because this is a serious issue.

I, for one, am grateful to live in the industrialized US where toilets abound everywhere, and even in parks such as my local Frick Park in Pittsburgh, there are port-a-potties in various locations within the park. I used to make fun of my immigrant parents for being strangely fixated on and happy about functioning and clean toilets, but the reality is that their generation and their parents’ generation in rural Taiwan did not necessarily have this luxury. In fact, even today, apparently, the sewage system is not great in Taiwan.