And I thought the election insanity plaguing the nation and listening to the U.S. president assess people’s buttocks was tough stuff.
And few things right now sound better than an extra hour’s sleep.
But, I don’t know. If it means that I find myself agreeing with President Donald J. “Buttwatcher” Trump and saying “so long” to the promise of an extra hour of snooze, that’s a tough call.
Every year about this time, and again in the spring, I plead with the nation’s leaders to stop the clock on the ridiculous daylight savings time swap.
Earlier this year, it looked like it might actually happen.
The House passed a bill in July, “Ditch the Switch,” that would make daylight saving time permanent. The vote was 308-117.
Yowser.
The Senate has since lost its way, but then, that’s what this Senate does. Four years ago, however, the chamber passed a similar bill.
That’s a good sign.
In 2022, Colorado state lawmakers passed a bill making Daylight Saving Time permanent, but it can’t take effect until surrounding states agree. It’s contingent on Utah and Wyoming to make the leap to sensibility. No hope there. Any kind of change scares those places, except time change.
Sigh.
A paltry 12% of Americans favor the current system of daylight saving time, according to a recent poll.
But as much as I want to ditch the switch for good, knowing I get an hour’s extra sleep next week and will only be 15 minutes late to everything for a month after the switch, instead of an hour and 15 minutes late, maybe waiting until spring one more time is a better idea.
And the notion that Trump and I could agree on absolutely anything is like having to sit next to an overflowing emesis pan in the hospital cafeteria on Irish stew day. But we share a birthday. I’m used to it.
I just have to keep my eye on the prize here.
In the giant encyclopedia of incredibly stupid things humans have inflicted on themselves and the planet, which boasts such notable feats as Chernobyl, Lauren Boebert and cappuccino-flavored potato chips, daylight saving time rises to the top of the list of heinous gaffes.
To understand how stupid the idea really is, you have to hearken back to a time when people did things because it was practical, and because being impractical often made you lunch for something else, face down in a river or tied to other unlucky humans building pyramids for some dude with too much eyeliner. Because people tended to get eaten or otherwise accosted in the dark, it was practical to avoid going out in it. And as people formed communities and taverns that opened and closed at particular hours, it became necessary to know how long until last call, and when morning-shift happy hour began.
So humans invented clocks. The first ones were sundials. This gets a little nerdy here, but the gist is that ancient Egyptians had a thing for “12,” just like modern Germans jones over “10.” Way-old timers identified 12 stars moving across the sky after sunset that marked the night. After several hundred years of refinement, voila, the 24-hour day was created. It wasn’t fancy, but it helped people know when to meet to watch mastodon demolition derbies, or something like that. In the summer, near the equinox, the shadow on the dial would point straight up at noon.
That’s important, Noon. Straight up. Mid-point of a 12-hour period of daylight. Simple and practical. If it’s noon, it’s four hours until two-for-one Egyptian honey wine at the CornerStone Pub and Pyramid. Within a few hundred years, we were all winding clocks and watches to let us know when to get to the bank to cover last night’s hot check before it got there.
Then came electric light, full-time jobs and The Great War. Germans (it’s always something with them, huh?) invented the game of moving the clocks ahead in an effort to conserve energy needed to generate electricity. Of course then we had to do the same thing. After the Great War, when the Germans went back to pouting and inventing other stuff, we all forgot about daylight saving time, because it was ridiculous, and we love us some electric light in this country.
Then the Germans started up again, this time inventing World War II, and we all needed more of everything and decided we could get it if we just moved the clocks ahead one hour in the spring. A lot of things didn’t make much sense about World War II, and this was one of them. So the war ends and the Germans go back to making killer trochen riesling and kicking our butts with their cars and skis, but we don’t shake off the daylight saving time. If it’s any consolation, we didn’t get rid of lame dad pants, either — another heinous human blunder.
Rather than scrap this ridiculous notion of “saving daylight,” we institutionalize the damned thing. We say it saves energy, which several studies show it clearly does not. We say that we keep at it to appease the farmers, which is a lie. Farmers are smart, rational people. They don’t care if you call it Work-Thirty. When the sun’s up, there’s farming to be done.
And so for the past 60 years, we’ve been dragging this useless boat anchor all over the calendar, saying that we’re all too vacuous or too OCD to go back to having the celestial dog wag the intervallic tail.
I would prefer that we just keep standard time year-round, because I’m old and fall asleep before the sun sets at the end of June already, but I support anything that ends something as dumb and useless as a bucket of hair inflicted on me because state and federal lawmakers love them some hand-wringing while most of us just want our hour back.
I know, come next spring, I’ll want my hour back, and I’ll support any lawmaker’s quest to get it. Maybe make this your voting touchstone so together we can beat the clock.
EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS IS UPDATED AND REPRINTED FROM EARLIER RANT.
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