Daylight Savings Time

This is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin due to his 1784 satirical essay to the French “An Economical Project” about getting up earlier than noon and wasting all the prenoon hours of light. In truth, or at least according to wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time, it is really the fault of William Willett who came up with the idea in 1905 and put forth as a proposal in 1907. William was one of those early rising people and thought people were squandering the early light. It was adopted by Germany in WWI and most of Europe soon followed suit. Thus we have “spring forward and fall back” burned into our brains and have had to suffer through this.

Lately, they have taken to starting it earlier and ending it later. They used to claim that it would save energy and in the pre-electric time this might have been true but current studies of the effect have shown no appreciable energy savings. This change has also been repeatedly shown to cause problems for many people for several weeks as they readjust their circadian rhythms to the new schedule twice a year.

As nice as the idea seems, having the sun set after 10pm during the summer makes it a lot harder to get to sleep when it’s still bright out – not to mention trying to put kids down. Plus, for the one drive-in that we still have, it would be better for business if they could start their movies before 11pm.

Once again I say that we should follow the forethought show by our neighbors to the west and abolish Daylight Savings Time. Instead, we have followed lockstep with our neighbors to the south as they not only maintain it, but have now extended it.

Let those keeners who want to take advantage of longer daylight hours get themselves up earlier in the morning instead of trying to push their beliefs on the rest of us.