Daylight Wasting Time: an idea whose time has gone?

Daylight Saving Time is finally over for now, and it feels great!

After the government's more serious fuck-ups of the past 28 years, fixing Daylight Saving Time might not be a high priority. But if everyone can agree on it now, we can clear it up and get it out of the way.

Daylight Wasting Time may be of some value if you're near the eastern boundary of your time zone and are in the proper time zone to begin with. In our area though, this test doesn't quite hold true. And it's much worse in, say, Louisville or most of Indiana. (Right-wing Gov. Mitch Daniels imposed the time change on Indiana because Big Business demanded it.)

We hear so much about how Daylight Saving Time is an "urban convenience", "helps the farmers", "saves energy", and so on and so on and Scooby-Dooby-Doo. But when the government extended Daylight Saving Time a few years ago, it had the backing of powerful energy corporations.

Why would they support something if it lets people use less energy? Simple. Because it doesn't. They know it, because Daylight Saving Time doesn't even apply in the winter months that would need it the most!

Even on Standard Time, much of the United States is actually in the wrong time zone. Time zone boundaries have been slowly trudging west in an effort to force communities to follow the time of their wealthier neighbors to the east. Thus, Standard Time in Cincinnati, which is in the Eastern Time Zone, is about 40 minutes off from the city's natural sundial time - while it would be only 20 minutes off if it was moved to the Central Time Zone.

A tolerable discrepancy, maybe. But it gets much wider during the 8 months a year of Daylight Wasting time - when the time is almost 2 hours off from its natural state. If Cincinnati was in the Central Time Zone, it would be only 40 minutes off.

This is a significant point, because the human body has a biological clock. Humans have an animal-like instinct that can tell day from night. If your body thinks it's 6 AM day after day after day when the "official" clock says 8 AM, you can't catch up.

I also think the work week should be shortened from 40 hours, like the rest of the world has already done, but some of the most aggravating manifestations of the toll taken by Daylight Wasting Time occur on weekends and holidays: By the time you wake up, half the day is already shot!

Millions of Americans spend the whole summer futilely playing catch-up!

What should we do about the greed-driven expansion of Daylight Saving Time? You could abolish it altogether, but there may be a select few American locales that may end up with the opposite problem we have.

You could move it to different months. If it has to be 8 months, why not make it so we have it in December when it gets dark the earliest?

Or just leave it alone - and shift the time zone boundaries back east. Folks today don't realize that Louisville and even Lexington were on Central Time until the '60s. If we move them back to Central Time, and if we add Cincinnati to Central Time as well, we've got a much better map than what we have now!

For the sake of us all, we can't let the current situation continue much longer. We can continue to condemn ourselves to lives of poor sleep habits, sluggishness, and futility. Or we can synchronize our alarm clocks with our bodies once again.