What Do You Mean It’s Too Early for Dinner? Daylight Savings Takes Its Toll

By Judi Curry

Once again we set our clocks back an hour last Sunday, but my dog Shadow cannot help but wonder why, just the other day, it was okay to have dinner at 6:00pm only to find that today he cannot have dinner at the same time. He said that he is not a farmer that needs more daylight to farm his crops.

In fact, my very intelligent dog said that there are very few small farms left in the entire United States that are maintained by Mom and Pop operations that need their children to help pull in the crops.

Many people, as well as animals, intensely dislike Daylight Saving Time.

Frequent complaints are the inconvenience of changing many clocks and adjusting to a new sleep schedule. For most people, this is a mere nuisance, but some people with sleep disorders find this transition very difficult. Indeed, there is evidence that the severity of auto accidents increases and work productivity decreases as people adjust to the time change.

Yet we continually change our clocks year after year after year.

It is interesting to note that FDR inaugurated the time change during WWII and called it “War Time.”

But on January 4, 1974, President Nixon signed into law the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973.  Congress has played with the time change since then.

Many parents are concerned that DST may result in danger to their children.  It is dark; the children are not as visible as they cross the street or wait at bus stops; it is colder than before the clocks are changed; and is conducive to many “stomach aches” that prevent the child from going to school.

Some argue that the energy savings touted by DST is offset by the energy used by those living in warm climates to cool their homes during summer afternoons and evenings. Similarly, the argument can be made that more evening hours of light encourage people to run errands and visit friends, thus consuming more gasoline.  The feeling is that that there is no more energy savings one way or another.

Neither Hawaii nor Arizona do anything with resetting their clocks throughout the year.

When I was a Principal in Mohave Valley, Arizona, across the border from California, many of my teachers lived in Needles, California.  They had two clocks in their homes – one with California time and one with Arizona time, because when California was on DST there was an hour difference between the two cities – yet they were less than one mile apart.  How confusing that must have been because their mean principal would not accept the excuse that they lived in another state when they were late.

Shadow wants to know what he can do about changing the time ahead an hour. After all, he is hungry at the old time; doesn’t want to wait for the new time.

In fact, his owner – me – also wants to stop changing the clocks back and forth.  People I talk to say the same thing.  The purpose of the original DST no longer exists.  So what do we do about it?  You realize it will take an “act of congress” to change the law.  Since they can’t find time to work on important things like the national debt, or saving social security, etc., maybe, as long as the time doesn’t change on them, they would like to tackle this problem.

Shadow would be eternally grateful.