I'm taking advantage of this glorious extra hour of weekend to think about time.
Time is something most of us take for granted, except twice a year when we are asked to set our clocks ahead one hour in the spring, and back one hour in the fall. And of course we especially think of if we're flying to a destination that requires traversing multiple time zones.
Our lives are determined by schedules which are almost always governed by the clock. We get up at a certain time, we start work at a certain time, have lunch, take an afternoon break or tea time (I believe always at 4PM), go home, have dinner, perform our evening rituals, and go to bed all at certain points in the day when the clock tells us to do so.
This of course wasn't always the case. Like the other animals in the wild at least, the entirety of human existence once depended entirely on the workings of nature and specifically in regards to time, the nature of the cosmos. More on that in a subsequent post.
That all changed fairly recently in the history of human evolution courtesy of technology (such as the mechanical clock) which has removed us bit by bit from the workings of nature, or so we believe.
Time is one of those inescapable forces of nature, perhaps best described by the opening line and refrain of Henry Austin Dobson's Poem The Paradiox of Time:
Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go;
Slightly less devastating, the rhythms of time not governed by the clock affect our daily lives in subtle ways that we recognize most profoundly when the clock on the wall (or perhaps more common these days the one on our smartphone) is thrown out of synch with our natural, internal clock, otherwise known as our circadian rhythm.
Which is why twice a year like clockwork, no pun intended, we're deluged in spring and fall by articles in the MSM and social media demanding a stop to this seemingly pointless ritual that most of us have been doing robotically all our lives.
Even the POTUS has stepped into the debate and is now demanding in his own charming way, that we put an end to the clock changing in favor of replacing the system we have now with permanent Daylight Saving Time taking the place of Standard Time.
I remember back in the seventies during the so called "Energy Crisis" when we tried switching to year-round Daylight Saving Time. You can read about it here.
The idea was that pushing sunset back one hour all year would reduce energy consumption, namely electricity usage as folks wouldn't need to switch on the lights in the evening for another hour.
Studies showed that while the switch did reduce some energy consumption, the amount was negligible. The downside was something that people who advocate for year-round DST seem to never take into account: delaying sunset for one hour also means delaying sunrise for an hour. It was the tradeoff of dark mornings that ended the experiment after only a couple go-arounds. It seemed that the pictures of children waiting for their morning school busses mid-winter in the pitch dark, and reports of some being killed on the way to school was too high a price to pay for the modest benefits of Daylight Saving Time in the winter months.
Naturally there are plenty of studies showing that the biannual changing of clocks affects circadian rhythms especially in the spring when we lose an hour to the point of causing disruption of sleep patterns which could cause health risks. Reports of heart attack and stroke rates increasing during these changes have been duly noted as well as increases of traffic accidents.
On the other hand, like the case in 1973-1975, I suppose one could study other problems caused by not changing the clocks and determine that the cost/benefit ratio of changing clocks or not in terms of human health turns out to be a wash.
The other inevitable question that would need to be resolved is which system would be chosen if we stop changing our clocks, Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time. Standard Time whose origins are much more recent than most folks probably imagine, is based on timekeeping going back ages which is itself based upon high noon being the moment when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. During the two equinoxes when the amount of time of daylight equals the amount of nighttime in a single day, if high noon is 12PM, then sunrise would be at 6AM and sunset at 6PM.
All the other days of the year adjust accordingly. From the vernal equinox in March until the summer solstice in June, sunrise is earlier every subsequent day and sunset later. After the summer solstice the process is reversed and the days get shorter and the nights longer through the autumnal equinox in September, and continuing until the winter solstice in December, the shortest day (and longest night) of the year, when the process reverses again.
Daylight Saving Time pushes everything forward meaning that during the equinoxes, sunrise is at 7AM, noon at 1PM and sunset at 7PM. This means that here in Chicago, if we were to have year-round Daylight Saving Time, on the winter solstice, sunrise wouldn't occur until 8:18AM. Remembering back when my kids were going to high school, they left the house at 6:45AM to catch the bus, meaning their entire trip to school would have taken place literally before the crack of dawn, which typically comes about one half hour before sunrise..
In areas north of Chicago, for example cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit and Minneapolis, sunrise would come even later in the morning, all points north of those, even later.
So that would be a reasonable argument for year-round Standard Time.
Oh but gosh how we like it staying light until 8 or 9PM in the summertime, thanks to Daylight Saving Time. There is no better time here in Chicago than a glorious sunkist summer evening. But if you've ever been in Arizona, especially south of Sedona in the summertime, you can understand why they are not keen on that extra hour of scorching sunlight in the evening. Which is precisely why they don't switch over to Daylight Saving Time in the spring.
It seems everyone has their own preferences for which time system we should use and when to use it. We can't let everyone pick and choose their own preferred system, else we'd have the chaos that the system of a Standard Time in the 19th Century was created to alleviate. In my own opinion, what we have now is a reasonable compromise which in the words of one online commenter, "pisses everybody off equally." Personally I don't like losing an hour every spring but I like the extra light in the evenings so I put up with it. And I love the extra hour today and prefer it being light earlier in the morning, both for myself (I get up at 5:45 during the week), AND for the kids going to school, while I'm not particularly fond of it getting dark at 4:30.
But I put up with it, it's just part of life.
Or to quote Mick Jagger, "You can't always get what you want."
Which is something the current POTUS doesn't seem to understand or accept. It seems his biggest argument for year-round DST is it's too complicated to change clocks (as if he's ever had to personally change a clock in his life) and so he can get in a couple extra holes of golf on the weekends at Maralago. As someone not known for being an early riser, he probably doesn't even notice how late it gets light in DST during the winter.
There's currently a bill in Congress passed by the House and awaiting passage by the Senate that calls for year-round DST. Most of the Senate Republicans eager (for reasons I can no longer explain) to please this president, support the bill. Stay tuned.
In other news, the mid-term elections are in two days.
Meaning what time is it?
Time to throw these bums out of office.
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