Did you see this in the news, that a woman is in big trouble in her community for hanging her laundry outside to dry? This is happening in Peraksie Pennsylvania. Although there are no town laws preventing her from doing so, a city official called her and asked her to quit, and, she's received notes from neighbors telling her they do not want to see her underwear flapping around on the clothesline. For the record, she doesn't hang her underwear out, she says.
The article says, she is "one of a growing number of Americans demanding the right to dry laundry on clotheslines despite local rules and a culture that frowns on it." Did you know there are 5 states that prohibit it all together? That would be Florida, Utah, Maine, Vermont, and Colorado. Another 5 states are considering legislation to outlaw it. A lawyer representing homeowners associations in Philly says that it is an "aesthetic" issue. He says, "In most communites, people don't want to see everybody else's laundry".
I gotta say that I am both amused and amazed. We live in a society that freely uses sexual images to sell everything from cars to beer to laundry detergent, and where anyone with a few clicks of a mouse button can view any sort of pornographic image they desire, no matter what. For our viewing pleasure on TV, there is conversation, and explicit language, and visual images which a person with any sense of morality would blush at. The innnocent bystander eating a meal or walking down the street is assaulted by private content of cell phone conversations. Kids freely use street language which you thought was only applicable in armed forces boot camps. Ugly billboards dot our landscape, and the carving away of our forests and pollution of our rivers and oceans is ongoing. Smokestacks belching black clouds and odors hang over our cities. Ground water contamination and nuclear waste disposal issues are ever with us.
We have people sleeping under bridges here in Wichita, and I would assume, in Pennsylvania as well.
And there are those who are offended at the sight of a shirt or a pair of jeans, or a towel, or bedsheets hanging on a clothesline in the sun. I'm...wordless.
2 comments:
I read that article also. Another point that it brought up was that, with a lot of people being so nuts about "going green", it just makes sense to hang clothes on the line. It saves energy, it helps the environment. My family has always hung clothes out on our line (and so do all our neighbors). I couldn't imagine my mom being told not to do it anymore. And like you say, of all the issues out there today, isn't this just slightly petty?
I think if you re-read that article, you'll see that those five states have passed laws that PRESERVE the right to hang clothes on the line. The text I read says, Florida, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii have passed laws restricting the rights of local authorities to stop residents using clotheslines.
They are restricting the ability of local governments to clamp down on the practice.
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