Down with Daylight Savings Time!

This is my battle cry that echos loud and clear two times a year. I tell everyone who will listen, and yet the sad truth is that I don’t talk to too many people. But now I’ve got this little blog. True, I have no idea if anybody has visited this space (save my husband and a few friends who have probably already heard my plea), but there is a chance that someday others will, so I’m laying the groundwork for my campaign to end Daylight Savings Time forever.

I realize that some people like DST. Some part of it, that is. For example, a friend realized that she could use it to her advantage with her two-year old’s new morning routine. What with fall-back, getting to school is so much easier and consequently mom has a much better time getting into the Pilates studio for a work out at the beginning of her day. That’s great, to be sure. The next logical question in my mind is what happens with spring-forward? Uhhhhh. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

DST is a pipe dream as far as I’m concerned. First we invent the construct of time and then we figure that we can manipulate it to suit us. Which I suppose is logical in some sense since it’s all made up anyway. But our natural rhythms are not made up. And our constructs mess with them. I know this purely at a gut instinct level because the health nut in me has always taken sleep very seriously. For me, the triad of good health comprises sleep, diet, and exercise. For those who are not so fundamentally opposed to messing with nature, typing daylight “savings time accident statistics” into the search field on google may be a useful exercise. Out of the long list of results, I picked this one first. See?! DST is a bad idea! And yet, the article doesn’t even touch that notion. Rather it concludes with the proposal that employers alter work schedules to accommodate DST. Why not just eliminate DST? Which leads me to my other worry, that bad ideas seem to catch like wild fire. And so I decided last year that abolishing DST was going on my bucket list.

Given the fullness of our lives at present, I wasn’t going to make a fuss about DST this year. We are just getting settled in back home after our Detroit visit, and I’ve got all sorts of projects in the hopper, my homage to Detroit tops the list. But today was our third day waking up around five ante meridiem (husband stays in bed, mind you) and frankly I’ve had enough. Traveling across time zones on top of adjusting to the new hour is too much for my patience to bear.

And so here begins my quest: rid humanity of a bad idea that has been given way more benefit of a doubt than it ever deserved.

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