Down With Daylight Saving Time

Admittedly, this early transition to DST has left me completely in a muddle. I usually have a hard time "springing forward" anyway, but this year, I've been late to work every day this week, and daylight saving time is to blame. I'm not sleepy when the clock says I should be, I'm not hungry when I'm supposed to be, my entire inner clock has been thrown out of whack.

In short, I have had it.

Why on earth do we insist on enduring such a ridiculous custom, first proposed in the late eighteenth century, prior to the invention of the artificial light source? What can we possibly hope to gain? Are you aware that the Clorox corporation petitioned to have DST extended because they are the parent company of Kingsford charcoal, the single biggest selling charcoal manufacturer in the country? Think they might have had an ulterior motive for extending daylight evening hours?

And before you go and blame the poor farmers (as my mother used to when we had to turn our clocks), you should know that this was NOT an appeasement of those hardworking, underappreciated folks who grow our food. Unlike the rest of us, farmers' lives are not dictated by a clock, but by a calendar, and by the natural sunlight. When the sun goes up, so does a farmer, who has a finite number of hours of daylight to get the work of the day done. Regardless of what the clock says, those hours are fewer in winter than in summer, and, barring a major shift in the Earth's orbital trajectory around the Sun, will likely remain so for a good long while. Farmers are equally as inconvenienced by DST as the rest of us, so don't lay the blame for this idiocy on their doorsteps.

No, no... we can thank the United States Department of Defense for this one. Not to delve too deeply into the history of it all, because I'm just so bored with it I could scream, the War Department instituted the time change during both World Wars to conserve energy by reducing the need for artificial light in summer. It was abandoned after WWI, but somehow managed to stick around in some places after WWII, until, in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966, making DST a matter of national policy. Nice to see that whole mess in Vietnam didn't keep them from deciding truly vital matters of national policy.

Last year, in an effort to do anythingbutANYTHING rather than deal with the genuine fustercluck going on in the White House and Iraq, Congress took time out of its busy day to increase DST by four weeks (three weeks earlier and one week later). Yet again, Congress turned its back on a killing, illegal, immoral war and allowed itself to be distracted by... what?... time? Morons!

Enough already. The website End Daylight Saving Time has a proposal which would make DST all year round, and illiminate all but two time zones, Eastern and Western. We'd all change our clocks once... just once... then leave them alone forever and ever. No more trying to figure out how many hours to add to the Central... or is it Mountain... time zone. East and West.

Get the government out of our bedrooms -- specifically, off of the nightstand. They need to pick a time -- any time -- and run with it. And they need to do it now, because the redhead is getting mighty cranky from loss of sleep!

~C~