Hey, guess what — World War I is over! Get used to it! We no longer need to conserve that new-fangled stuff called electricity so we can defeat the Kaiser.
It just so happens that the semi-annual time-shift currently imposed on all but two of the United States is much more disruptive than the effects of jetlag. When traveling into another time zone, the sun still rises and sets at the same local time as before. When the clocks are changed, however, the visual cues that affect one’s circadian rhythms are not changed. So why do we keep doing this?
There is overwhelming political support for abolishing the time shift. Most folks favor staying in daylight savings throughout the year. While staying in standard time is a close runner-up. Bottom line: making us change our clocks twice a year is totally unpopular. And yet our political professionals seem to have punted on the issue… ostensibly because they couldn’t achieve a consensus as to whether to make daylight savings or standard time the one to be permanent. A simple coin toss could have solved this problem.
Why bring this up now? It just so happens that we must lurch back into standard time just two days before the official date of this year’s election. It may seem that springing forward could be more disruptive than falling back, but there’s still a serious impact from the one hour back-shift. Early voting may take away some of the impact…but most of the tabulating of the election’s results and all of the “news” reporting on it will definitely occur after the befuddling time shift happens.
Although, at least to me, it seems that setting the clocks ahead has more negative impact than setting them back. But compiled statistics show that both changes accompany similar increases in heart attacks. Shift workers in particular are already seriously stressed over their daily sleep-work schedules. It would only make sense for them to be especially impacted by this nonsensical tinkering.
That we are still compelled to go through with such a major inconvenience is nothing more than a throbbing example of negligent tyranny — government needlessly harming its citizens due to its lack of serious concern. This is especially obnoxious since no compelling reason for doing this damage still exists. It is, of course, true that the days naturally keep getting shorter anyhow. That will always continue until just before Christmas — which has been happening since long before the beginning of time. Screwing with clock settings doesn’t change that — it just puts a lot more groggy drivers on the roads during the morning commute.
I suspect that the pullers of the levers of power are disregarding this glaring example of the government not going out of its way to avoid harming its citizens. Why? As usual, they think that they can get away with it. After all, we’ll get a whole weekend to adjust. Whoopie!
Until about the mid-1800s, timekeeping was mostly done at a local level — hence the continuing use back then of sun dials even though reliable mechanical clocks were becoming fairly common. Governments started getting seriously involved in standardizing time once railroads became a common conveyance that allowed people to quickly move across meridians of longitude. For railroads to operate on a specific schedule, time had to be standardized across a defined swath, east to west. We now call these Time Zones.
In his book Sapiens, Israeli neo-Marxist Yuval Noah Hariri has a particularly interesting segment on the formalization of time. It was yet another way the world was changed… largely due to technology. Bottom line: “Official” time is a fairly new concept. Daylight savings is a little over a hundred years old.
