There’s no telling where daylight-savings time might lead: prosperity, weight-loss...even peace
Dan Brawner
March 06, 2007
We’re adaptable. It’s what made humans a successful species. Give us an Ice Age...no problem. An Industrial Revolution? We can handle it. We’re told we need cars, TV’s, cell phones. Fine. We’re adaptable. And now, we’re being told it’s an hour earlier that it really is–in fact it’s three weeks earlier than they told us last year.
Ben Franklin was the first to propose the whole mass deception of daylight-savings time back in 1784 in a pamphlet entitled, “The Waste of Daylight” in which he no doubt hoped to share his obsessive Protestant work ethic with his already overworked fellow New Englanders. I don’t know if that was before or after he zapped himself with lightning in his famous kite experiment. But it wasn’t until 1918 that Congress passed the Standard Time Act, creating time zones and daylight-savings time, encouraging Americans to spend more daylight hours outside.
Of course, back in those days, a lot fewer people had high definition TV, wireless Internet and Xboxes. Not to mention, light bulbs. Staying inside wasn’t that fun. There wasn’t much to do. Might just as well get up an hour earlier. Bathrooms were often outside anyway.
People are already starting to complain that the thousands of electronic devices with their own internal clocks will be thrown off by the new daylight-saving time. Meetings and international flights will be missed, computers will be an hour behind and automobile clocks will have to be reset. The clock in my car is always either the correct time or it is “preset” for daylight-savings time. In other words, I never bother to set it.
Last year, Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided to move up daylight-saving time by three weeks and extend it by one additional week. The U.S. Department of Energy estimated that this would save about one percent of our total energy usage. And maybe it would inspire morbidly obese couch potatoes to run and frolic in the great outdoors.
Yeah, right. If we are told to get up an hour earlier, it will only mean that we have to close our curtains an hour earlier to keep the sun off the wide-screen TV and the laptop computer. But it might make it easier to see where we put that jumbo bag of Cheeze Doodles.
It’s all very well to force Americans to get up an hour earlier, but if the government really wants to save on electricity, they should force us to get out of the house and walk around, not on a motorized treadmill, but on sidewalks and grass-- in the natural light. We could bring the National Guard troops home from those oil-rich countries and they could go house-to-house and have us all go outside. It would be hard at first. But we’d get used to it.
Before long, we’d be tanned and fit. And the energy the country would save would cut down on the need for those expensive wars in the Middle East. Sure, it would take some getting used to. But we’re adaptable.
Ben Franklin was the first to propose the whole mass deception of daylight-savings time back in 1784 in a pamphlet entitled, “The Waste of Daylight” in which he no doubt hoped to share his obsessive Protestant work ethic with his already overworked fellow New Englanders. I don’t know if that was before or after he zapped himself with lightning in his famous kite experiment. But it wasn’t until 1918 that Congress passed the Standard Time Act, creating time zones and daylight-savings time, encouraging Americans to spend more daylight hours outside.
Of course, back in those days, a lot fewer people had high definition TV, wireless Internet and Xboxes. Not to mention, light bulbs. Staying inside wasn’t that fun. There wasn’t much to do. Might just as well get up an hour earlier. Bathrooms were often outside anyway.
People are already starting to complain that the thousands of electronic devices with their own internal clocks will be thrown off by the new daylight-saving time. Meetings and international flights will be missed, computers will be an hour behind and automobile clocks will have to be reset. The clock in my car is always either the correct time or it is “preset” for daylight-savings time. In other words, I never bother to set it.
Last year, Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided to move up daylight-saving time by three weeks and extend it by one additional week. The U.S. Department of Energy estimated that this would save about one percent of our total energy usage. And maybe it would inspire morbidly obese couch potatoes to run and frolic in the great outdoors.
Yeah, right. If we are told to get up an hour earlier, it will only mean that we have to close our curtains an hour earlier to keep the sun off the wide-screen TV and the laptop computer. But it might make it easier to see where we put that jumbo bag of Cheeze Doodles.
It’s all very well to force Americans to get up an hour earlier, but if the government really wants to save on electricity, they should force us to get out of the house and walk around, not on a motorized treadmill, but on sidewalks and grass-- in the natural light. We could bring the National Guard troops home from those oil-rich countries and they could go house-to-house and have us all go outside. It would be hard at first. But we’d get used to it.
Before long, we’d be tanned and fit. And the energy the country would save would cut down on the need for those expensive wars in the Middle East. Sure, it would take some getting used to. But we’re adaptable.
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