Out to Dry

Okay, the laundry--that piece I didn't get to yesterday. Reading the front page section of the New York on Sunday, I discovered that there is actually a live political debate in this country about the use of clotheslines in one's own backyard. Apparently there are 60 million people living in the United States in areas where clotheslines are outlawed!

What? Is this a conspiracy by GE and other corporate giants to insure purchase and use of their energy-hungry drying machines? (Full disclosure: we dry our wash that way. Sorry!) At a time when the planet is dying as a result of our human species' increasing need for energy sources, when we even go to war to be sure we get our share, we make it illegal to hang out the wash to dry on a sunny day?

The problem, it seems, is that the sight of clean laundry on the line is offensive to the American eye. It's that same eye that requires that fruits and vegetables be without defect, regular in shape and color--even at the sacrifice of taste! It's the eye that gobbles up those glossy advertisements for unaffordable designer clothing lines in magazines, but rejects the mundane clothesline as unbeautiful. The eye that had, during the last administration, to be protected from the sight of coffins returning from Iraq.

Let us all please not be disturbed by anything unsightly. Let us please be protected from anything that disturbs our comfortable blandness. Lord, spare us from the sight of other peoples' underwear.