Many years ago I knew someone far more cynical than I (hard to believe, but true), who once explained to me that since Pro is the opposite of Con, Congress will always be on the wrong side of Progress.
I'm not sure how correct, or incorrect, his logic was in developing that perspective, but I think last week's unanimous vote by the United States Senate to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in these United States starting in 2023 with passage of The Sunshine Protection Act might have given him cause for pause to reassess that conclusion.
I mean the last time, in my memory, the Senate moved as swiftly and surely (and spoke as if with one voice) on anything was forty years ago in support of President Ronald Reagan declaring August National Peach Month
Admittedly, the same unanimity and solidarity were on exhibit as well back in 1970 when President Richard Nixon proclaimed the first National Clown Week, but we don't talk much about that one, do we? Something about low-hanging fruit, or bottles of seltzer, I suspect.
Like you, I wandered around even more out of sorts than my normal for about three days after we sprang forward last Saturday night/Sunday morning. The springing I can still do but more and more I stick the landing less and less.
And, probably, like your house, there's always at least one clock we didn't 'fix' before turning in (and it's my wife who does the temporal adjustments otherwise every digital display in my house would be flashing 12:00 for a month or more if I were in charge), more often than not it's the one on the range that makes the buzzer sound as you struggle to adjust it not because you're doing anything wrong but because it's in its nature.
Speaking of which, not counting the White Rabbit (and his oversized pocket-watch leading me to wonder what he was compensating for), there's no other creature anywhere in nature with a fixation about time that we bi-peds have. We slice it and dice it into nans of nano-seconds through to and beyond the lightest of light-years (where's Buzz when we need him?) in an attempt I guess to exert some sort of control over something over which we have NO control.
And when we're all still a little groggy and grouchy from shifting of our circadian rhythms (and not cicada as I was told as a kid by someone who looked like Jiminy Cricket), the notion of ending the forth-and back-of-back-and-forth of clock adjustment is not without a certain amount of appeal. Heck, on more than one evening after supper last week I went for a stroll around my neighborhood, enjoying the still-daylight at seven o'clock.
But, I'm thinking we should be careful what we wish for.
We're going to have MORE daylight anyway through the Summer Solstice because of the earth's rotation and tilt of its axis as it circles the sun. After that, through late December, we'll have less and less daylight to start and end the day, again, because of the positional relationship to the sun. None of it has anything to do with a timepiece and our arbitrary designation of an o'clock.
So how enthused will you be to have to get the kids ready for school in the fall of 2023 when it will be dark not just at five or six but maybe also at seven in the morning and maybe until after the school bus picks them up? And your morning commute? Perhaps making what we call Standard Time, the year-round standard, is better for us both in the long and short of it?
Even better, instead of worries about springing forward and falling back, we could devote ourselves to making the most of every moment we have, knowing no matter how they are measured, once they are gone, they are gone forever.
All we have is the space between our birth and our death; what we do in that space is the only thing that's important.
-bill kenny
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