THE OLD DAYS
By Arthur Vidro
This coming weekend we will switch over to daylight saving time.
So don’t make any plans for 2:30 a.m. on Sunday the 9th. There won’t be any 2:30 a.m. that morning.
For at 2 a.m. on Sunday, daylight saving time kicks in, instantly making the time of day 3 a.m.
Then in the autumn we’ll exit daylight saving and move the clocks backward an hour.
Most folks agree they dislike changing the clock back and forth in the spring and autumn.
It also wreaks havoc with the body’s natural rhythms.
So there’s little disagreement — even in Congress — that folks want to do away with this flip-flopping back and forth clock game.
But we continue to keep playing games with the clock.
Why? Because we can’t come to an agreement on whether the permanent clock should be standard time or if it should be daylight saving.
The United States first used daylight saving time in 1918, as a measure to conserve energy during the World War.
Despite its name, daylight saving time does not “save” daylight. It just shifts which hours of the day receive the daylight. The daylight begins one hour later in the morning and ends one hour later in the evening.
That hour, though, can make a difference in people’s lives.
It might mean the difference between driving home from work in the dark versus driving home in waning daylight.
It makes a big difference to farmers, who tend to prefer standard time. A lot of work can’t be done until the sun rises. Delaying the hour at which the sun rises means delaying the time of day a farmer’s workday begins; to continue to work a full day he’d have to work an extra hour later into the evening.
Animals don’t favor one time system or the other. The roosters will crow at sunup, no matter what we do to the clocks.
The clock-adjusting debate will continue.
Though nobody champions the status quo, the major disagreement is always whether to make daylight saving permanent, or to abolish it entirely?
In our household, we would prefer to abolish it entirely. We prefer for daylight to begin and end earlier. We don’t appreciate the house in summer still being so darned hot late into the evening. In the summer, folks who want to turn in to bed early might find daylight saving hinders their chance to get to sleep.
Still, others I’ve spoken to find the notion of daylight saving wonderfully magical, and insist it creates more daylight, which they crave. A beloved relative in Florida asks, “Why wouldn’t you want more daylight?”
I tried to explain to her that more daylight is not being created.
Do you want daylight to begin and end earlier? Then do away with daylight saving time.
Do you want daylight to begin and end later? Then embrace daylight saving time.
But you end up with the same amount of daylight regardless.
Most folks have forgotten, but we tried to solve this problem 50 years ago, when the United States made daylight saving permanent. At least for a short while.
It was a response to the soaring prices of gasoline and oil in 1973, what we back then called “the energy crisis.” So our nation, in 1974, implemented permanent daylight saving, meaning that we stopped shifting the clocks back and forth. We experimented with keeping daylight saving time for all 12 months of the year, with the intention of making it perpetual.
I was around during that experiment. I still remember walking about 200 yards to the school bus stop and wondering what obstacles or people I might bump into or stumble over.
Because of daylight saving, the sun hadn’t yet risen, but the first period at school still began at 7:35 a.m. So I was now walking to the bus stop in blackness.
After a winter of dark mornings, public support eroded, and the experiment ended. About a year later, our nation did away with permanent daylight saving. The unintended consequences were too severe.
And we’ve been shifting our clocks twice a year ever since.
Well, not everywhere. For in the United States, Arizona (excluding the Navajo nation), Hawaii, and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands do not follow daylight saving time.
Indiana didn’t adopt daylight saving until 2006.
My opinion is, if we continue to move the clocks back one hour in the autumn and forward one hour in the spring, we should at least put a proper label on what we’re doing.
Daylight saving time is a misleading term.
Let’s call it: Daylight shifting time.
