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Daylight Saving
TimeSpringing
Forward Falling Backby
Dorothy Hamm | |
When
did we become such a time obsessive culture? We have clocks in every room and
watches for every day of the week. We have clocks in and on everything we own…radios,
television sets, home appliances and in our cars. There are clocks everywhere,
and yet most of us complain that we never have enough time. Apparently we somehow
manage to “lose” it. Have you ever heard someone say they got a speeding ticket
because they were trying to make up for “lost” time?
Did you know there
are some cultures in our world today that do not have clocks? Not many, perhaps,
and certainly not any that are “industrialized.” The really odd thing is, those
cultures seem to have plenty of time.
Time, or lack of it, has become
such an issue with Americans that our government evidently thought they needed
to step in and institute a sort of “social security” for it. I am deeply grateful
to be living in a country where I can disagree with my government. And I do quite
often. Disagree I mean. Daylight Saving Time (DST) is but one of those areas of
continuing dissent.
I resent DST tinkering with my body clock twice a
year by insisting I spring forward and then fall back. Listen, falling back may
not be such a big deal, but when I run the idea of springing forward past my internal
clock it seems to have developed a bit of attitude. In the first place, it thinks
it is absurd for Congress or anyone for that matter, to think they can cut and
paste time. I think I heard it muttering something about taking DST and putting
it, uh, well, some place where there isn’t any daylight.
Benjamin Franklin
is credited with “inventing’ DST. Now I will be quick to say Ben was a brilliant
man who had a lot of good ideas. I just don’t think this was one of them.
The idea is good, my more tractable friends have explained when I voice my objections…which
is every spring. DST gives us an extra hour of sunshine each day they say. This
probably sounds like a good idea for folks in Seattle, San Francisco or Philadelphia.
But in Texas, where summer temperatures think nothing of settling in at 100 plus
degrees for weeks at a time, another hour, indeed another minute of pavement melting
sunshine, is not high on my list of things I want more of.
As for Ben
Franklin, I don’t think he ever spent so much as five minutes in Texas in the
summer. If he had he might not have been so enthusiastic about trying to arrange
for more sunshine for us.
There are a lot of things we do need more of
in Texas, inexpensive and convenient mass transit would really be nice for a lot
of good reasons. Ditto for healthy, low cal chicken fried steak and Tex-Mex food.
How about some more mountains? I would really like that. What do you mean we can’t
make mountains? If we can change time we can make mountains.
What if we
took all our garbage from all over the state and put it in a single pile. Before
too long we could have a good start on a nice sized mountain. Then in the spring
when they start having those dust storms out in West Texas we could offer a big
reward to someone who would invent an air vacuum that would suck all that dust
from the air and then we would put it on the mountain, add some rocks, plant some
aspen trees and we could be skiing downhill on that mountain in only a few decades.
Not going to happen you say? Well, its food for thought.
But back to sunshine
and how to save and redistribute it. The only time we could use more sunshine
in Texas is in the winter. Hasn’t Congress or Ben or anyone besides me ever noticed
that the days are shorter in winter? And cooler too. An extra hour of sunshine
would be quite welcome then. | | |
