The crime of LOOKING poor

The New York Times has a truly fascinating article on the battle over the right to hang your clothes dry. First off an interesting statistic from the article is at least 6% of household electrical consumption comes from clothes dryers. That is something that is maybe used for only a few hours a week. (Contrast that to refrigerators that are on constantly). It makes sense since they are basically super large incandescent light bulbs.

So a clear way to reduce one's carbon footprint would be to hang your clothes outside and benefit from the heat of the sun. But in most private communities, this is banned. The primary reasons is that it is thought to lower property values. But clotheslines themselves do not lower property values it's the really what they signal.

“The issue has brought together younger folks who are more pro-environment and very older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer,” said a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia, State Senator Linda T. Puller

So an item of choice, becomes an item of not looking poor. Note that it doesn't actually say that if you hang your clothes, that you are poor. Just that you appear poor. Americans for claiming to be a class free society are sure hung up on status. If anything, perhaps it's that we have imprinted in our collective psyche that profligacy equals success. Look at the mcmansions, the SUVs, the rise of disposables as signifiers of success.

Now supposedly there was a time when being wasteful was looked down upon, as being uncouth and a sign of being uneducated. Being prudent was viewed as having good common sense. Now it's looked as if you are being poort. So instead we hock our lives in debt to look wealthy instead of actually being wealthy.

Perhaps we need to rethink what status means, and how we demonstrate it.