(Host) That long holiday weekend we
just had was filled with warm sunny days – perfect for hanging your laundry
outside on a line. That is, if you’re
allowed to. Independence Day gave
commentator Bill Schubart a chance to reflect on the "right to dry."
(SCHUBART) Nature conveys no rights and only a few
privileges. You could be driving your
country club golf cart down several square miles of manicured fairway and be
struck dead by lightning, swarmed by voles, or attacked by feral swine with
tusks. There are no guarantees in nature.
Rights are conveyed by thoughtful governments. For example, our
unalienable right to have an AK-47 in the bedroom – or our right to choose or
make up our own religion – have both been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court.
However, many rights are still under debate – such as habeas
corpus or the right to call your great grandmother in Cuba without someone eavesdropping to see if she is a terrorist – or
the right to work for a living, as opposed to working for healthcare premiums
and taxes to fund reconstruction in countries we have attacked. These rights
will all be sorted out in time. But there is one unalienable right that must be
safeguarded.
According to a recent news report, Wai Wang of Maryland has been
demonstrating in our nation’s capital for the "right to dry."
If it is not yet, this should be made an unalienable right.
My wife and I live in Hinesburg. We have cut our electrical usage
by a third by using CFL bulbs, turning things off when we aren’t using them,
and retiring our dryer, which used the same power when running as ninety five
60-watt bulbs, enough to light all the woods in our neighborhood.
We have not heard word one from our neighbors about our hanging
our personal garments outdoors to dry in the recent rains. My double-X undies
luff in the breeze like a top gallant on one of the tall ships, and no one
complains. Of course, we live in the woods.
Apparently, though, there are gated communities, condo
organizations and housing committees that see the outdoor drying of laundry as
an offense to the eye – a throwback to the tenement days of their forefathers –
and do not allow home owners to dry their clothes outdoors for fear of lowering
property values or intimating poverty.
This would make an independent Vermonter crazy – like the guy who
bucks authority and paints his house a garish neon blue in a "quaint
town" where zoning laws dictate that everyone has to paint their house
white. Or nowadays the Thoreauvian fellow who buys an outdoor furnace so big that
a family of four with a dog and a goldfish could live in it quite comfortably –
and burns hemlock, corn cobs, tires and old Levis to avoid the thousand dollar
fill-up of his oil tank. Go figure.
We are going to have to sort out this fragile balance of rights
and privileges, especially as our role as champion consumers is challenged by
aspiring middle classes around the globe. We will have to get over our effete
sensibilities about laundry blowing in the wind and lawn ornaments displaced by
piles of drying wood. We must at all costs, however, enshrine the "right
to dry."
(Host) Bill Schubart lives and dries his laundry and wood in
Hinesburg.