Daylight Saving Time

It's just stupid.

We already have plenty of daylight in the summer. When we really need that extra hour of evening sunlight is in the winter, when the days are depressingly short anyway.

In the fall, when daylight saving time ends and a change is made back to standard time, the sun sets an hour earlier each day. So in the winter, instead of getting dark at six, for example, it gets dark at five - cheerful, isn't it? [note the heavy sarcasm]

The lost hour of sleep in the spring causes a rise in traffic accidents following the change; there is a corresponding cost in human lives.

People with sleep disorders find the time changes disruptive to their schedules and very difficult to adjust to.

International time zones are not synchronized with respect to daylight saving time. Even within the United States and its territories, there are differences in observance.

Frankly, it's just plain confusing.

I like what this writer had to say in 1947: "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)

If we are to observe daylight saving time, why not reverse the time shift? It would make a whole lot more sense to "fall forward" and "spring back."

I understand that we currently "fall back" because the energy conservation advantage of daylight saving time is lost in winter months with the need for early morning lighting due to the later sunrise. So rather than ripping a conceptual hole in the fabric of time, why not wait until the sun rises to get up? Why not change the starting times of our businesess and schools rather than the clock? Are we trying to beat even the farmers? (Morning people, you conspirators, you!) Our entire schedules are organized - not around the natural rhythms of the earth and our bodies - but around an artificial construct imposed by the abstraction of time.

Do you ever wonder where that hour goes in the spring when the clock magically flips from 1:59 a.m. to 3:00 a.m.? I think it goes in my sock drawer to be stored until that time in the fall when the hour is retrieved and the clock flips from 1:59 a.m. back to 1:00 a.m.