Why I Despise Time Change

Musings of an Aging Mind

By Jack Bagley

The weekend of March 7th and 8th, we did the semi-annual ritual of advancing our clocks one hour, as Daylight Saving Time began. The result reminded me why I totally despise the entire idea of Daylight Saving Time.
First of all, we aren’t actually saving anything.
The idea of setting our clocks forward one hour to “gain” an hour of daylight implies that there’s extra light out there to grab. There isn’t. What we’re doing is making sunrise later, so sunset is later, or some such silliness as that.
It’s like taking a blanket, cutting one foot off the end, sewing it onto the other end, and saying your blanket is a foot longer. (Thanks to my Native American brethren for that metaphor; I like it a lot.)
I can recall when the U.S. went to year-round Daylight Saving Time back in the 1970s. It was touted as a great idea – and weirdly, we’re hearing the same idea being proposed once again. Well, either advancing the clocks all year round or not advancing the clocks all year round, one or the other. Back when I was in high school in the early ‘70s, though, the clocks were advanced all year.
It was a disaster.
Kids were waiting for school buses in the dark, throughout the entire school year. Families didn’t even have the hope of sunrise coming earlier, because with the clocks adjusted, it didn’t – not while school was in session, anyway.
Daylight Saving Time only provides “extra” daylight during the late spring, summer, and early fall. It doesn’t do a blessed bit of good during the school year – which is fall, winter, and early spring.
People have a hard time adjusting to DST as well.  (I’m going to use that abbreviation for the rest of this column; I’m tired of writing out Daylight Saving Time.)
For instance, I don’t react well to it at all. The older I get, the harder it is for me to adjust my sleep cycle to the late/early onset of sunrise, depending on whether the clocks are set forward or not. It takes longer and longer for my circadian rhythm to catch up to the foolish adjustment of arbitrary time.
You know, back in our history, we didn’t worry about things like time zones or DST or anything like that.  Noon, for instance, was when the Sun was directly overhead, not when some bureaucratic muckey-muck said it was.
That meant, as you’ve already figured out, that noon in this part of Georgia was not the same as noon in another part of the state. Curvature of the Earth and all that.
This was at a time when people were doing a lot of traveling – by stagecoach, then by train. It became important for schedules to be synchronized, so “time zones” were created.
Then came DST and it all went to heck in a handbasket.
Why can’t we just follow the lead of, say, Arizona, which doesn’t bother with DST at all?
Well, there’s a major issue there too.  (Follow along closely, because this is easily confusing.) See, the Navajo Nation of Native Americans does recognize DST, and that area spans Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Arizona doesn’t participate in DST, but the other two states do.
So while Arizona doesn’t change their clocks, the Navajo living there do, and as Mental Floss puts it, there’s a doughnut in Arizona where the Navajo are an hour ahead of the land around it – and the land inside it.
Huh?
Yes, there’s a section of the Navajo reservation that doesn’t set their clocks forward. The Hopi reservation, which is fully within the Arizona part of the Navajo nation, does not participate in DST, so as to be in synch with the state of Arizona around it.
I told you it was confusing.
One of the silliest so-called compromises I’ve heard offered about the DST issue is a “meet halfway” idea, which calls for setting clocks ahead a half hour and leaving them there year round, thus basking in the DST glow (sort of) for the current time frame and being out of it (again, sort of) for the months in which we run on standard time.
Halfway?  More like half-wit.
I just don’t think changing the clocks twice a year is a good idea. It may have had some value to farmers when Benjamin Franklin proposed it back in the 1700s, but plants neither know nor care what time it is. They know sunlight, and darkness. Humans should adapt to that, not the other way around.
Besides, this year – for the first time – I forgot to set my clocks forward.
I overslept the next morning.