A Matter of Time
Atlanta, GA
March 20, 2022
Well, I guess we’re never getting that hour back.
Even when government does the right thing, it does the wrong thing. Last week, Senate voted to remove the ridiculous ritual of adjusting clocks. But it did so by keeping the wrong time.
Starting next year….assuming the House and president agree with the bill the Senate passed….“Daylight Savings Time” becomes permanent.
Standard Time – denoted as such because it follows our natural rhythms and the solar cycle – would disappear. Or, more accurately, it’d still be there. But, like eternal advice from a Carmelite nun to a street corner pimp, we’d simply ignore it…and suffer the consequences.
This isn’t the first effort at this farce. Congress imposed perennial “Daylight Savings” in 1974, but abandoned the two-year experiment even before it was set to expire. As children stood at dark bus stops and circadian rhythms became confused, people realized they hated the unnatural attempt to monkey with time.
If this latest effort passes, Arizona and Hawaii will be the only states where the clocks are correct. All others will permanently pretend to be part of the time zone immediately to their east (some, like the New England states, probably should be).
But this isn’t surprising. We live in a world that’s filled with phoniness to indulge our fantasies. Don’t like how light it is at 6p? Just pretend it’s 7p! If nothing else, Happy Hour will start that much sooner.
Sounds great. But why stop there? Why not move the clocks up a couple additional hours to get even “more daylight”? Then we could go sailing after dinner or play golf till midnight.
And time isn’t the only constraint we could casually cast aside. We can distort or dispense with lots of limits to improve our world.
In the funhouse mirror of our make-believe culture, we could merely wish away or redefine whatever we don’t like. Why confine ourselves to natural laws and scientific constraints?
We already pretend we can change the “climate”, that men are women, and that fewer freedoms will efface a virus. In a fake world without real constraints, artificial expedients are endless.
For instance, what’s the point of additional daylight if the weather’s awful? Let’s pass a law that all thermometers constantly display 70 degrees so we can enjoy comfortable temperatures all year round.
And if we’re going to be out and about in our newfound bliss, weather and light aren’t the only appearances that must improve. To trim some fat and make ourselves taller, let’s add some ounces to a pound and remove a few inches from a foot. That’ll lengthen our legs and lighten our load.
We have financial fables too. Crank economists convince us we can create real money from thin air. And if you can make up the money, you can control everything…at least if you’re one of the ones who gets it first.
Time, as they say, is money. But money is also time. And as with time, when you mess with the money, you screw with everything.
Money is not merely a store of value and a unit of account. It’s also a communication mechanism. Like the sun passing overhead, it speaks as it moves…informing where things stand and where we should go. At least until the government gets in the way, and clouds things up.
Yet each day, like every coin, has two sides. We think we’d enjoy the sun setting after dinner. But will we like it rising a couple hours before lunch? Will we want to begin each day in the middle of nature’s night? Is it healthy to do so? Do we even care?
And do we really want the sun, like a humorless hall monitor, watching over us so deep into the day? A setting sun is a signal. Time to retreat home from a hectic day…perhaps to open a window in the summer, or light a fire in the winter. We lift our feet, pour some wine, and loosen our limbs. We relax, and let our hair down.
These natural inclinations are less instinctive with a solar schoolmarm standing over us. She has her place. But it’s in the morning, to roust us awake and get us going. We don’t need an intrusive day hanging around at night, when we gather at the table or round the hearth, to talk about it behind its back.
From ancient sundials to atomic clocks, devices to track time are intended to tell the truth. Now, as night follows day, comes an all-knowing US Congress to legislate another lie.
Many Americans, envisioning an extra hour of evening light, are cheering the deception. It’s easier to see the light than to envision the dark. But no matter how much they finagle their clocks, they’ll get both…and perhaps more of each than they think they’d prefer.
But today, on the Vernal Equinox, they’ll come in equal measure. Around the world, the solar scale stands in balance. But the more we try to tip it toward us, the greater the chance we all fall off.
JD
