People are always trying to come up with something new that makes life a little easier: a vegetable peeler to replace a paring knife, a power mower to replace a scythe, a leaf-blower to replace a rake. Someone, somewhere, came up with the idea of fitted sheets to replace flat sheets so they will stay in place during a restless sleep.
And those fitted sheets are one of the banes of existence.
I speak from experience.
We used to own a 25-foot motor home which provided some enjoyable outings until it caught fire and required a replacement. For all the good times we had with that original RV, there also was the annoyance of making the bed, which barely fit into the space allocated for it. Keeping a regular sheet in place was next to impossible, so we found a fitted sheet just the right size for that mattress. The trouble was that, in order to get the sheet over the far side of the mattress required crawling across the bed to tuck in each corner, an act that usually led to the front corners popping off. It would require four or five attempts to get the darned thing in place.
When we bought our get-away cottage, it came with a nice large bed that had storage drawers underneath. The only problem was that the bedroom was only slightly larger than the bed. Just as with the motor home, in order to get a fitted sheet on the bed, there was endless drama of crawling front to back to front to back in order to get all four corners over the mattress.
The task of making the bed usually fell to me while other family members handled dishes or packing away the food or cleaning — or at least that was the excuse for delegating me to handle the fitted-sheet duty. And it always left me exhausted.
Perhaps as annoying as putting a fitted sheet upon a bed is folding a clean one to put away on the shelf. There is no way to neatly fold a fitted sheet. Those corner pockets also have a tendency to collect other items in the dryer, such as socks. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many unmatched socks, it’s probably because a fitted sheet has absconded with the missing ones.
Apparently, there is a proper way to fold a fitted sheet, and, like everything else, there is an answer right there on the internet:
My dismay and dislike of fitted sheets came to my rescue when I was drawing a blank on what to write about following a calm and pleasant Fourth of July Weekend. I could have written about the firing of personal fireworks just down the road from us, surprising the dog and waking us up at midnight. I also could have written about the endless parade of boats going up and down the river, and the inebriated fellow standing on the bow of a boat going upstream where, just around the bend, a Marine Patrol boat would be coming back downriver after checking boat decals. But only fitted sheets seemed to be the right way to get back into writing after three days of relaxation.
That’s because, as I struggled with replacing the bedding that would be coming home with us for laundering, it occurred to me how well fitted sheets could serve as a metaphor for the constraints on freedom that have everyone so worked up. Just as fitted sheets fool us into thinking they are solving a problem when in fact they are messing with our sanity, many of the measures that society imposes on us actually leave us in worse shape than we would have been without them.
I’m not talking about COVID mandates, which likely saved more lives than they harmed and were, at worst, misguided attempts based on the best information available at the time.
I’m talking about rules that seem to be there only because someone wants to make rules. I thought of regulations that seem to make no sense when I heard that Dalton voters had rejected a permanent zoning ordinance that would have protected the town from a toxic landfill. Residents were more worried about losing their freedoms than about the potential of contamination from an improperly sited solid waste management facility.
They were worried about things like requiring someone to get a building permit to erect a fence, or having to put in a septic system for an RV that has a holding tank that can be emptied at a local dumping station, or requiring someone with a functioning well to hook into the municipal water system.
The thing is, the proposed rules in Dalton were pretty benign compared to some zoning ordinances. However, because the country is celebrating its independence and freedom, it seemed appropriate to consider encroachments on our freedoms.
Libertarians object to government interference with personal decisions, whether it be what people do with their land, what they choose to smoke, or what health measures they want to take. Those objections make sense as long as people are not polluting a neighbor’s property, coercing someone into taking drugs, or infecting others with highly communicable diseases.
Traditional Republicans are fiscally conservative but socially liberal, as evidenced by Abraham Lincoln’s calls for schools and hospitals. Many current Republicans, however, have rejected efforts to make lives better for everyone, instead focusing on greed.
Progressive Democrats believe in helping the poor and middle class by restoring reasonable taxes on the wealthy, rather than allowing those with more wealth than many countries in the world get away with paying nothing. Yet many progressives err by wanting to remove historical artifacts, rather than keeping them in place so we can remember past mistakes and move on. We need to recognize the good that flawed people accomplished as well as the bad, and work at making the country better. It helps no one to impose feelings of guilt on those who had nothing to do with the oils of the past, and doing do only creates new types of oppression.
I am an Independent, unwilling to go along with any party’s platform. Each position we consider must be placed in its proper context, and weighed against other options. It is easy to make something appear to fit into a tidy package, but not so easy to make it useful in meeting the real needs around us. Sometimes those simple solutions require as many contortions as making a fitted sheet conform to that mattress.
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From another independent, thank you for the analogies today! Politics is an excellent comparison to fitted sheets which brings to mind many experiences wrestling with them -- the politics, positions and people, and the beds. 🙂