Let’s enjoy daylight like this while we can and not worry about the time change, dumb though it may be.
Rather than fulminate against the coming switch back to standard time, how about this for a change: Let’s try to ignore it.
As you know — or will be reminded if you forget — the mistakenly named “daylight saving time” will end this weekend, once again causing discomfort not to mention wasted effort among those of us still messing around with mechanical clocks. (Clocks, that is, not controlled by some unseen force far away and automatically advanced an hour in the spring and set back an hour in the fall.)
The time change twice a year is so pointless and dangerous that even the Oregon Department of Transportation feels compelled to warn us about its effects. “It means potential disruption to sleep patterns which can result in drowsy, inattentive driving,” ODOT says in a press release. How dangerous is drowsy driving? Last year, ODOT says, 15 people in Oregon died because of it.
So here’s a thought: How about resistance? Rebellion? Making a stand? Refusing to go along?
It’s not that hard to stay on summer time. We just leave the clocks and watches alone. Don’t touch them. And for the next few months, we ignore them. Or if we look at them at all, we remember that they’re an hour fast and act accordingly. Or not. If not, and we have an appointment at 8, say, we might get there an hour early. Big deal. Take a book, or spend the time watching YouTube entertainment on our phone.
This could get you into trouble with your job. If so, don’t do this. Just follow the herd and fall back to standard time the way The Man tells you to. For the rest of us, we’ll just run our lives the way we’ve been doing it since March 12, when summer time last took effect. (hh)
While I agree with you 100% Hasso, I’m afraid that the power of inertia is an awesome thing to overcome. Plus, we would face the scare tactics about school children being run over in the dark; and the assertion that “we’ve always done it this way”. But the reality is that we only have so many hours of daylight on any given day and the clock is nothing more than a device to be manipulated. And then of course we have the politicians who know what’s better for us than we do and delight in every little means of making us toe the line. But, good luck, I’m with you – I just don’t know that just the two of us ignoring PST will make any difference except to us.
Ya know H.H., to carry your thinking a bit further you could extol your readers to believe that Hillary “won” the election & just ignore Trump. Must be a slow day on the bicycle that this dead horse issue gets a beating yet once again? O but were the important worries of this troubled world only over such a trivial matter.
I want daylight savings all year round. I need light in the evening, I sleep in morning, but I have to function at night. I have heard that we need to go back to standard time because of the school busses. The extra light they get in the morning only last a week or two and then it is dark anyway. Why not just keep it the same all year.
The Great Tick Tock Rebellion? Easier to do if one is retired. Save the protest for the spring forward! After all, this is the easy to follow the herd as we gain the hour.
Hasso…I thought you were The Man.
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
Alan Watts
Neither Arizona nor Hawaii participate in the time change. Daylight savings time is an antiquated idea that is no longer appropriate in today’s society and should have been do e away with about 50 years ago if not even longer.
Both places are closer to the Equator and thus don’t have as extreme differences in day/night length. On the 1st day of winter, Honolulu has 2 more hours of daylight (and 2 hours less darkness) than us.
I like the time change, one day if my generation doesn’t totally get screwed over and I am able to retire I will be indifferent
I’d be all for year-round Daylight Time, but I am happy to keep changing the clocks if the alternative would be year-round standard time. IMO, Daylight Time is needed more now than ever before. In our modern culture, there are more people (including myself) who have jobs working under someone else’s thumb than in the past.. Most of these jobs have fixed hours, and the only time these people have to get anything done for themselves is in the evening. Life is short, and I appreciate as many hours of useable daylight out from under someone’s thumb as I can get. In our area, during the longest days of the year, the sun would come up at 4:30 am if we were on standard time. Why let an hour of good daylight go to waste in the morning while we are sleeping or getting ready to go to work? I know this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think it applies to most working Americans. For those to whom it doesn’t apply, they probably have enough flexibility in their schedules that it wouldn’t matter much to them, no matter what time we are on.