“I
don’t care what they call it, it’s still 7 o'clock!”, said I, quite irritated.
“Spoken
like a true curmudgeon”, replied the Sergeant Major.
“Well,
it’s true. They think they can just
change time, but they can’t. It’s still
1pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). All
they’ve done is to make me go to work from 7:30am to 4pm, instead of 8:30am to
5pm. The Earth is still rotating at the
same rate. It didn’t speed up at 2am
Sunday morning!”
By
now I was highly agitated, and that, along with some coffee, was the primary
reason I was even awake. Yes, I know
that farmers are supposed to “get up with the sun”, or some such nonsense, so I
guess I’ll just have to be the exception to the rule.
But
while we’re on that subject, my animals find this change annoying as well. They measure time by the sun, as they
should. Now, because their farmer has
gone off his rocker, they will be eating their meals an hour earlier. That will go on for some months until it
suddenly changes back and they find themselves eating at the proper time, or an
hour later, or something. No wonder they
remain somewhat skeptical of humans. We
can be quite inconsistent with even the very basics.
The
only ones who win are the chickens because they have food and water available
24/7, and the rooster still crows at sunrise.
Nothing arbitrary and capricious about that. Sure, the couple that comes by to see them
every day will wander by an hour earlier than usual, but so what?
For
the horses, pigs, alpacas and donkeys, tough luck. People screw with me; I screw with you. Stuff flows downhill, as they say.
But
why? Why do we bring this pain on
ourselves? According to my research it
can be described in one word: Evil. The guys who came up with this abomination
were 1) Early risers, and 2) Busybodies.
They were up. The sun was
up. Why was everyone else still asleep?
“You’re
wasting daylight”, they cried.
“So
what”, said the Farmers. “The dew makes
it too wet to cut hay until later. We’re
going back to bed, thank you very much”.
And
so they did, and slept just fine until World War I, when the busy bodies
returned in force.
“There’s
a war on you know”, they cried.
“The
cows don’t care”, the Farmers shouted.
And
for reasons still not fully understood except that people tend to lose their
minds in war time, Daylight Savings Time became a reality. For a while. It was repealed after the war, and
it stayed gone until, you guessed it, the next World War. This time the rallying cry was to “Save
Energy” although it’s never been clear that it actually saves very much
energy. At any rate, after the war, it
went away again, but like any other really bad idea, it just wouldn’t stay gone.
So how
do you keep selling this bad idea? “For
the children”, of course. Thousands of
school children would be mowed down by speeding motorists while they stood in
the road waiting for the bus. Or some
such thing. But Americans being
Americans if it “saves even one child’s life” we have to do it.
And
so we do. Funny thing is though, the
people who actually made this happen were the grill and charcoal makers,
amusement park owners, fast food companies, and the makers of sporting
goods—People who all benefited if Joe the Plumber got off work at 4pm instead
of 5pm. He and his buds now had an extra
hour to grill out, drink beer, or go fishing while their wives could run down
to the store or take the kids to the amusement park while it was still
daylight.
This
is why I get to spend two weeks in the Spring and another two weeks in the
Fall, feeling like death warmed over while my body reluctantly adjusts its
Circadian rhythms to please a bunch of early rising busybodies, in cahoots with
businessmen and politicians.
Quit
telling me that “Time changes”. No. Nature’s time is Nature’s time and my animals
and I know it. You might have the power
to make me go to work an hour earlier, and get off work an hour earlier, but
you didn’t change time. All you did was
change my schedule.
