Like many other Americans in 48 of the 50 states, this has been a groggy Monday morning for me. While I’m not a morning person, I like to think that I’m able to at least form complete sentences on a Monday morning, but today the haze is thicker than usual and this can be attributed to just one thing: the beginning of Daylight Saving Time.
Now, I’ve written before about how I despise Daylight Saving Time. I know many croak about the virtues of “having more sunlight” and “longer days” but no matter who many ways you dice the math, each day will have the amount of sunlight, it’s just that we are fooling our bodies into rising when we should be sleeping, eating when we’re not hungry and thus stumbling our way to work down dimly lit streets in the morning so we can proclaim that the day is longer and Mabel and Finster, the precious little monsters that they are, can enjoy playing outside after supper with all the neighborhood kids, when in reality they’re up to their eyeballs in Common Core homework and probably playing video games anyway.
“But the farmers love it!”. This is something that the Daylight Saving Time evangelists always screech, usually at an ear splitting decibel. I’ve never met a farmer who just randomly barked out, “I can’t wait to milk Bessie in the dark”! Hens are not awake, roosters are silent and Bessie don’t want no farmer touching her teets but by god, we are going to start our day earlier because we’re making the day longer.
It makes me want to push a suburbanite-loaded Hummer off a cliff with my bare hands.
I think I’m ranting.
The truth of the matter is, I don’t care about the length of the day. It’s going to be 24 hours regardless of what we label it and if there’s more sun in the am or pm makes no difference to me. What I do care about is this flipping the clock back and forth. For the love of everything that is sane, why can’t we just set the clock and be done with it? I know that compromise is a bad word when it comes to government and lately the American populace in general, but why can’t we just set the clock 30 minutes ahead and then never readjust it again? This flipping back and forth is asinine and quite frankly, even though I think we should just stick to standard time throughout the year, I could live with a 30 minute increase.
For those of us that get our day started at 0530 and want to get a good night’s sleep, it absolutely sucks that it’s still light out at 10:00 p.m. For a country who thrives on the rigidity of the typical 8 to 5, you’d think that swinging time around like it’s nobody’s business would make people crazy, but they couldn’t care less because “they get more sunlight”. Set your damn alarm clock to start the day an hour earlier and you’d have the same exact scenario without inconveniencing the rest of the country to match your whims.
I’m getting a little worked up about this as I type this post.
I asked a co-worker why we do this whole DST thing, and there reply was that it was because we always have. Aside from the fact that DST didn’t start in the US until 1918 (and in the world in 1916), that “because we always have” excuse is just like that short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, where they stone a person to death to ensure good crops because it’s something they always did. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind throwing a rock at the idiot that came up with this idea.
If DST is so great, just set it and leave it. That’s all I ask.
