Daylight Savings Time

We changed our clocks back to standard time today. In what seems like an instant, our evenings become darker an hour sooner and the harbinger of winter smacks us in the face. One doesn't need to live in the Arctic Circle to feel the depression of winter's gloom, when our daylight hours are the shortest. The fact is, it's going to happen naturally anyway, one short day at a time. But this day shocks us every year, like a giant switch, turning off the sun at dinner time.

For nearly a century now, we've been springing ahead and falling back every six months and many of us don't know why. It cannot be the old thought that the farmers needed the extra hour of daylight to work the fields. Farmers, as we have known them, don't have to live by clocks anyway and tend to get up with the sun no matter what time it is. Or so they used to.

We think that daylight savings had more to do with city life. Perhaps the small garment factories and other sweat shops back in the early part of the twentieth century utilized DST to afford more natural light so the little children who worked in them could see long into the evening.

Scientifically (or astronomically) speaking, we learned in General Science 101 that our Earth's axis is not perpendicular to the sun. Rather, it points to the north star. It is this tilt that, during a complete revolution around the sun, creates the seasons. As the winter approaches, the north pole continues to point to the north star and away from the sun, allowing us the least amount of daylight than any other time.

It is a natural thing that happens whether we want it to or not. But just as we start getting used to earlier sunsets, we turn back the clocks and watch it get dark on our way home from work.

Why do we do it? There's nothing etched in stone to set the clocks ahead in the spring. Some states, like Indiana, do not follow DST at all, spending half the year in the central time zone and the other half of the year in the eastern time zone. Of course, Lake County, moves the clock along with Chicago so it is off kilter with other Indiana cities during the winter. Crazy.

We recently read an article from Australia that encouraged DST. The author explained how by extending daylight in the evening there is more daylight to accompany pedestrians during the evening hours, when more people are active on the streets than in the morning hours. But you must remember that DST occurs from April through October, when the land down under (which is in the southern hemisphere) is getting less natural light because they are going through their winter. Ooooh, it gets too complicated, don't it?

DST makes sense with that scenario, but if we wanted to follow the Australian reasoning, why don't we save the hour in the winter, when it is needed the most? Instead, we push the sunset to as late as 9:00pm on June 21st (the summer solstice). That makes for a tough date at a drive-in double feature (do they have them anymore?) or a casual evening stroll.

Millennium Man believes we should follow the seasons naturally, with whatever amount of daylight the celestials deem for us. The sun has been rising and setting on its own for over 40 million millennia and it's still going strong. It doesn't much care what time it rises in the morning or sets during your day.

We are looking for some logical reasons why we should keep DST . . . and the benefits to abolish it. Your comments are welcome.