Saving What Now?

Tonight we lose another hour of our lives, sacrificed on the altar of “more daylight” in the form of Daylight Savings Time.

This has never made any sense at all to me.

It seems to me that we have the same amount of daylight regardless of how it is measured, and that there is altogether too much of the stuff anyway.  Daylight is when you go to work.  Daylight is when noisy people insist on making noise at you.  Daylight needs to be drained, not saved.  We need more night, where it is quiet and there is time to reflect.

But the world is run by morning people who got up earlier than the rest of us and monopolized all the good stuff, and they think this gives them the right to tell everyone else what to do.  So we have Daylight Savings Time and work starts shortly after sunrise and everything grinds to a halt once the moon rises, at least officially.

I don’t get it, but there you go.

As far as I am concerned the only useful function that Daylight Savings Time serves is that it reminds us that the clock is an arbitrary way to measure time, one that can be set however one prefers with equal validity and thus being yelled at for coming home after curfew is a bit odd.  That made a lot more sense to me as a teenager than as a parent of teenagers, but there you have it.

Not everyone participates in this mass delusion, of course.  A couple of summers ago when we went to the Grand Canyon we had to take into account the fact that Arizona does not bother with all of this nonsense, though many of the Reservations do.  So it was a bit of a nuisance trying to figure out precisely what time we were expected to arrive where, as Utah – where we were driving down to the Grand Canyon from – does uniformly observe Daylight Savings Time and I had no idea how much if any of the Grand Canyon or the road to it was located in any Reservation.

It used to bother me that not everyone took part, but now I think those places are onto something and that we should take them as a model.

Of course here in Wisconsin it is expected that all my clocks will be an hour ahead of themselves tomorrow and my sleep schedule will be similarly compromised.  It’s been years since I kept a regular enough schedule for that to matter – probably high school, now that I think about it – but still.  It is a bother, and the world is full enough of bothers as it is.

So this may be from an hour into the past or the future or whatever it all works out to be.

Greetings, time travelers!