An Immodest Proposal

I think the problem with society today is clothes dryers. See that just goes to prove you never know what small thing is going to have a permanent impact on society and slip up on you when you least expect it. While many people deal with the evils of drugs, alcohol, and loose morals, I believe the real and root cause of many of societies ills today is the automatic clothes dryer.
When I was a boy, no one had a clothes dryers; gas or electric. What we had was a Maytag with big old rollers on the top that would squeeze the water out of your sheets and underwear, and the life out of your hand if you were not careful. When the water was squeezed out the clothes were dropped into a clean #2 washtub and eventually carried down into the back yard and hung on the clothes lines that stretched all along the back of our house. Now we lived on a corner and our back yard was clearly visible as one drove up Jefferson Avenue. So, for anyone driving by to see, there they hung in all of their glory, the whole family’s underwear; flapping in the breeze, fluttering in the wind. If there were holes, there they hung. If there were rips, they were exposed. If there were – well you get the idea. We were a family that had literally nothing to hide.
I remember someone giving the advice early, when I began doing public speaking, to just imagine the whole audience in their underwear and it would be a great equalizer. That speaker’s trick didn’t work for me; I found it to distracting and rather disturbing, but I suppose the idea was, it is hard to be high and mighty or haughty and judgmental when your underwear is showing.
Now I know it is not unusual for certain people to appear on national T.V. in their underwear for commercials and not a few entertainers appear in little more than their underwear on a regular basis, but that really doesn’t count. Also, it has not escaped my attention that more than a few teenage boys like to wear their pants at half mast and let the tops of their highly colored boxers show, which incidentally is not something I want to see. None of these troublesome appearances of underwear as outerwear are however of the same impact as your day-to-day whitey-tighties hanging on the line fluttering in the slightest breath of air.
I is hard to be pretentious, uppity, or aggressive with people you know have just driven by and viewed you laundry with all of its, spots, stains and rips there open for inspection. There is just an openness, an honesty about the whole process of hanging out the wash that makes the neighborhood more of a community than we have today.
I’m pretty sure that in the neighborhood I live in today, if we even tried to erect a clothesline and hang out the wash, we would have irate neighbors, clutching copies of the neighborhood covenants, demanding we remove the offending laundry forthwith. Now that is just wrong.
Even in our churches we find ourselves Sunday after Sunday dressed in our Sunday suit, not the one made of polyester but the one made of sanctimonious, pious, appearances; afraid to let what is underneath show for fear our fellow church goers will be repelled by the truth of who we are and likewise we hope to never catch a glimpse beyond the surface of their own, all to human, lives. We see through a glass darkly, but there is one who see us as we are, face-to-face.
So my proposal is, if the government wants to do something to really promote world peace and do away with cyber bullying, hate crimes, and bigotry, they simply pass a law immediately banning clothes dryers and ordering the erecting of clothes lines in our yards. But I’m not holding my breath until it happens. Unless of course, they can find some way to exempt themselves from the directive. I leave you with the words of that country philosopher, Jerry Clower, “Be Yourself.”
Have a blessed day, Bob