Daylight Shifting Time

That’s what they should call it, because it really doesn’t save anything. There are the same number of hours of daylight and darkness, however you slice it. But the debate over DST’s benefits has had a long history – a century of it, in fact.

The U.S. did not invent it. Apparently, it was the Germans who did so on the grounds of conserving fuel during World War I. In this country, President Roosevelt made it a year-round thing during World War II – it was called War Time, but it didn’t last. Congress has fussed with it on and off since then. It used to run only from April to October. More recently, it was extended from March to November. Unfortunately, some of my older electronic devices did not get the message. They automatically switch under the original schedule. So, I have to reset timers four times a year instead of two.

As to the benefits, I love the long twilit evenings, but would it work as a year-long thing? Proponents, mostly business people, say year-round DST would be better for the economy because it would promote more shopping, recreation and entertainment. Would it save energy? That record is much spottier. Opponents have long argued that children would die because of accidents related to their having to get up in the dark in winter to go to school. And there are those who argue that we should just pick one time scheme and stick to it, due to the bad health effects of “instant summer and instant winter,” and traffic accidents related to it.

The federal government has largely taken control of this issue, but the dumbest thing, IMHO, is that the law still allows states to decide whether to observe DST or not. We are now down to only two states that don’t: Arizona and Hawaii.  In Arizona, by the way, the state doesn’t recognize daylight saving, but the Navajo nation does on its tribal lands. Puerto Rico and other US territories don’t. But now, here comes Florida, planning to observe it all year.

I think the time should be the time, and that we should pick one nationwide scheme and be done with it. Now, I live in a latitude where if Standard Time were in effect year-round, the 4:45 am birds that wake me up in late spring and high summer would be doing so at 3:45 a.m. At least with one scheme, though, the jarring effects of time-shifting and the inconvenience of clock-setting would go away, and we might appreciate the seasons more. My vote is to keep Standard Time all year. I’ll live with the birds if it keeps the school kids safe. However, as a fallback position, so to speak, how about DST from the first day of spring to the first day of autumn? OK, OK, it was just a thought.

Clocking In

I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m beginning to think our twice-a-year time shifting in and out of Daylight Saving Time is useless. This year, it fell on Halloween weekend, so I joked that vampires get an extra nighttime hour to suck blood, but in practice, they don’t: the number of hours of darkness and daylight before we set our clocks behind remains the same afterward. We “give up” an hour in the spring and we “get it back” in the fall, and when we “get it back,” it seems like a gift of some sort. Sorry, but this sounds an awful lot like taxes.

Animals, of course, do not recognize our artificial time shifts. Our pets tend to show up in the morning at their food dishes according to when daylight happens, expecting us to perform for them. It may be harder for human beings, as our fixed schedules don’t adjust for daylight: you either get up in darkness to go to work or drive home in darkness. Which is better? In the modern world, most people do both.

The winter months don’t help much with this process, simply because there are fewer hours of daylight on both ends. I have long loved DST because it says “spring,” and because those long summer evenings are delightful. But because there are so many hours of daylight in temperate latitudes, aren’t those summer evenings long anyway?

We can get into fistfights about how much energy DST actually saves, the necessity for children to wait for school buses in the dark, or the number of traffic accidents that occur because of the abrupt change in light conditions caused by the one-hour shift. But there are so many differences in workstyles and lifestyles that these time shifts will cause pain for some people and pleasure for others. So it all comes out in the wash, which is an argument for just leaving the clocks alone.

The other problem is, the whole DST thing is all subject to the whims of legislators. Arizona might secede from the Union if it were told it had to make the time shifts (and don’t ask, “Would we miss it?”). Plus, when Congress changed the dates of DST some years ago, many of my older electronic devices, which had DST built into them, didn’t get the memo, and choosing “automatic” for the time-set feature on these things is unreliable. So I have to reset them four times a year instead of twice.

We actually do have control over the amount of daylight we enjoy, but it’s expensive. We have to change latitudes. You can have the Endless Summer promised by the movie title just by having homes in two different hemispheres. Or, if you prefer, endless winter. Which means if you’re vampire, you’d better like it cold.

I’ll be back in about an hour, I have to run around the house and reset about 27 things. See ya.