Drying Clothes

It’s long been a matter of public knowledge that almost every “homeowners’ association” in the United States forbids its members from hanging their clothes out to dry. Hanging clothes outside? Allowing the sun to dry them? Surely only the riff-raff engage in such foolishness. Use an electric dryer, or move to a trailer park!

Well, maybe not; some trailer parks don’t allow it, either. I suppose those trailer parks have a different class of riff-raff; the upper crust of the lower crust, if you will.

The theory is that hanging clothes will decrease property values. After all, we can’t have those dryerless hoi polloi in our neighborhood; if we’ve got those people here, then clearly this isn’t the type of neighborhood we thought it was. A neighborhood, by this theory, is better, and thus the property values higher, the richer the people who live therein. Rich people have dryers. So we simply must keep out the people who don’t have dryers, or our house won’t appreciate, and we won’t be able to flip it for twice its price in three years when we move to a still better neighborhood with still richer people living in it.

The distributist has to ask himself: what sort of people have we become? It’s bad enough that we’re so inorganic we refuse to rely on nature for anything ourselves; have we really become so antiseptic, so privileged that we refuse even to live next to people who might have a little less than, or choose a little differently from, ourselves?

We’re not talking about someone amassing large quantities of dead cars to rust in his front yard; this doesn’t involve a dog barking all night and bothering the entire neighborhood. It’s not even a particularly unsightly paint job. This is people drying their clothes. This is people performing one of the daily and necessary tasks of existence, and using God’s own dryer to do it. Granted, it doesn’t match well with the chemical lawns and shiny SUVs that mark American’s suburban wastelands, but surely hanging clothes out to dry is natural and good, a necessary function of life for those who choose not to buy an electric dryer.

Are there not many good reasons to choose to forgo this luxury? Dryers are expensive; perhaps a family’s broke down, and they determined it was better to hang their clothes out than to go into or further their debt repairing or replacing it. Perhaps they decided they didn’t want to waste the energy required to run such a power-hungry machine. Perhaps, most admirably, they wanted to increase their independence from power companies and appliance manufacturers and repairmen, trying to stay closer to God’s nature than a complex machine performing such a basic task would allow. Why should anyone want to insert ordinances or regulations into such decisions? Aren’t independence and frugality things we should be trying to encourage?

Still, while forbidding the hanging of clothes may be obnoxious, it’s hardly pernicious. But these regulations don’t stop there; they go well behind mandating a minimum wealth and consumption standard in order to actively discourage independence and production. Take, for example, the small-scale raising of livestock. Many single-family lots are sufficient to support a goat or two, or a few chickens, in a sanitary and beneficial way. This would provide families with valuable milk, eggs, meat, or even wool, all commodities which are constantly increasing in price. Producing food is a basic and everyday economic activity; indeed, it is the most basic and everyday economic activity of all. Nothing could be more conducive to economic independence. Yet in most urban and suburban areas, local ordinances prevent nearly all useful animals from being kept by citizens.

Generally our leaders cite sanitation as grounds for preventing citizens from exercising this kind of economic independence, just as aesthetics are cited as grounds for preventing citizens from hanging their clothes to dry. But why not then forbid unsanitary keeping of animals? Wouldn’t this fit the purpose, without preventing the vast majority, whose animals would be kept in a sanitary and cleanly manner, from performing such a basic economic task? Don’t we want to encourage our citizens to be productive and independent?

The answer, sadly, is no. Our society does not want productive and independent citizens; it wants consumptive and dependent ones. It wants us to depend on our bosses, to keep us laboring for others to make the money that we’ll spend on ever-more-expensive necessities and ever-more-numerous luxuries. Luxuries like, for example, the electric dryer. A clothesline? That couldn’t have cost very much! How does that help the economy?

As citizens subject to such intrusive and unjustified laws and regulations, we should voice our objections to our local and state leaders. Let’s change our laws to encourage production, action, and economic independence, rather than mere consumption, passivity, and dependence. But more importantly, let’s buck the trend and begin to actually produce some wealth, rather than merely consume it. Distributism, like all real reform, begins in the home.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Postscript: It appears the link about trailer parks forbidding hanging clothes out to dry, once publicly available, as been restricted by the Gray Lady. Apologies. Essentially, it recited a story about a trailer park resident who wanted to hang her clothing out to dry in order to use less energy, but was forbidden by the local regulations.