Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

It wasn't exactly what Dylan Thomas had in mind but I'm still raging. Daylight Saving begins this weekend. I love that extra hour of sleep in November, but I'd gladly exchange it for no time change at all. Here in the heart of the Midwest,  we sit pretty badly for such an early change. It has just started getting light about 6:30 a.m. now. Come time change, it will be another month before we see such glorious rays so early. The very thought makes me grumpy. Why, why why do we have to fumble with time?

It was Ben Franklin's idea. I'm guessing he didn't like sleep anywhere nearly as much as I do. Although I'm pretty sure most of colonial America shared my love of a warm bed because thrifty Ben's idea went no where. It wasn't until 1905 that anything happened with Daylight Saving, and it was a Brit who (re)started the movement. William Willett loved his early morning horse rides, and was flabbergasted that the rest of his neighbors chose to sleep through the early morning rays. So, he wrote a pamphlet on how much Britain would benefit from rising earlier. When a bill to introduce Daylight Saving was introduced into Parliament, it was met with huge opposition. Ironically, most strongly from farmers. It is a myth that agriculture benefits from setting the clocks back. Dew still lays heavy on crops in the morning the warmer months and there is little farmer can do with them until the dew has evaporated. The bill died and Brits continued to enjoy a good night's sleep.

World War I and II did that elusive hour of sleep in for the world, however. Troops needed light for battle. Factories needed to save money on electricity by working when the sun was shining.

We've been fiddling with time ever since.

In 2005, the oddest form of greed changed Daylight Saving. Sporting manufacturers and convenience stores lobbied Congress to move the beginning of Daylight Saving up from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. Their reasoning? Money. Customers frequent their stores and/or use their products more often when the sun is out.

Oddly, the sun is not out any earlier here. In fact, we're thrown into darkness in the mornings for at least another month. Granted it's out later, but how many slurpies can a person drink in that extra 30 minutes of sunlight? 

Congress retained the right to go back to the 1986 Daylight Saving Schedule should the new one prove too contentious. In all honesty, it doesn't seem very likely that will happen. The sporting industry and convenience stores organized, lobbied, and paid for the change. A massive grassroots movement to change what dollars and cents have produced seems an almost impossible Leviathan feat.

There is hope, however. In the United States, Hawaii doesn't observe Daylight Saving. Too close to the equator for sunrise and sunset to change too much.

Think they've got room for one more sleep-deprived, Daylight Saving refugee?

Shout out to Daylight Saving

It's that time of year again. Daylight Saving Time. Spring forward time. Be tired time.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am a very reluctant daylight saving participant. We didn't even have daylight saving in Indiana when I was growing up. I wasn't "exposed" to the insanity until I left the state. Imagine my alarm. I've never quite gotten over it.

Still, it comes every year. Spring is the worst, losing an hour of sleep. Sunday is okay. You can fake it through the day, but Monday morning? Oh, Nellie. I started dreading it yesterday afternoon, and come 5:45 a.m., a.k.a. 4:45 a.m., this morning when my alarm went off, I hated it. I grumbled, "Whose brilliant idea is daylight saving anyway?"

I decided to get behind the mystery of daylight saving. Now, I have to say, I should have realized who was behind the master plan. I really should have. There is really only one person to blame for "improvements" of this nature.

Yes, it's good ole Ben Franklin. His wasn't a new idea, however. The Romans - of course - practiced daylight saving, albeit in an oh-so-preindustrial-revolution-and-no-trains-on-schedules kind of way. They had 12 hours of sunlight every day. Period. In the winter, those twelve hours were shorter than in the summer. In the summer, the sunrise hour lasted 75 minutes. In the winter, a brief 44. Time really was relative. I can only imagine what the average Roman citizen thought of that.

Ben Franklin revisited the idea of saving time in the summer when he was in France (notice, not in the U.S. where farmers might have lynched him for such crazy talk). He was, ironically - or perhaps ever so pertinently - trying to find a way to save on energy costs. That's when he came up with his "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" saying. He suggested Parisians could save money on candles by getting up earlier. He even wrote an essay on it "An Economical Project," but the Parisians were apparently as loathe to changing their clocks as I am. They didn't embrace the idea at all.

And so it died for a while, until William Willett came around. Willett, an Englishman, was an avid outdoorsman and golfer. As he road across the English countryside, he was appalled at how much of the day people slept through in the summer - bad, bad loafers! He began to push for Fanklin's daylight saving approach in England. His idea, while supported by Edward VI and Churchill, wasn't enacted in his lifetime, nor first in England. Guess who was against it - farmers. They hated it (apparently, crops should be harvested when the dew has dried. Having workers in earlier means ineffective work time. The crops are still drying early in the morning. So it's a big waste for farmers to start the day with the sun.) They effectively kept DST from English lands.

So how did this whole nuttiness of changing clocks ever get started?

Really, the blame lies with the Germans. I'm married to one. He grew up there, the whole nine yards. Germans are all about efficiency, I'll give them that. But it was war, WW I to be exact, that drove them to enact DST. Not one of the sites I visited says why. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it was to cut on energy costs and get in more fighting time. WW I was fought in the trenches. No light. No fighting. When the U.S. entered WW I in 1918, we adopted daylight saving.

U.S. farmers weren't any happier than British ones about the change. Post WW I, they lobbied effectively to abolish DST in the U.S. It was enacted again during WW II, and then abolished again. In fact, DST as we know it now didn't come about until 1966.

And guess who is its greatest proponent today (I'd have never figured this one out) - convenience stores. More daylight means bigger sales for them. And, of course, the sporting industry. In fact, it was convenience stores and sporting manufacturers who lobbied for and got the present extension of DST that went into effect in 2007. Who knew.

So there you have it. It's a "huge conspiracy" dating back hundreds to thousands of years. My shout out today is to all of those forward thinkers who didn't have anything better to do than play with time. When the sand man is beating me to death tomorrow morning, now I'll know who to shake my sleepy fists at.