The Writers Who Kill Curmudgeon by Susan Van Kirk

 I’m showing my age when I mention I’m turning into Andy Rooney, the old curmudgeon on the Sixty Minutes show on television. For you youngsters, Andy Rooney was a journalist who used to complain about everything.

More specifically, I’m thinking about WHY AM I UP AT 6 AM FOR THE FOURTH MORNING IN A ROW WHEN MY TIRED BODY COULD BE SLEEPING IN UNTIL 7 OR 7:30?

I hate and do not understand why we must change our clocks twice a year, but particularly in the fall when we change back to standard time. It might make it a little lighter in the morning for a brief time, but I will already have been up an hour before the sun decides to join me. By the time my body adjusts to the new time, I’ll already lose that sunshine because I’ll still be asleep. So why?

To me, it falls into the same ridiculous traditions that have no place in modern life. For example, here in the Midwest, rural schools often begin after Labor Day because the farmers are still out in the fields and need help with the harvest. Have you been by those fields lately and seen the millions of dollars’ worth of computerized equipment that stands in for “help” these days? They have huge lights that negate the darkness over the fields. When I first began teaching, students were excused in the fall to go hunting during hunting season. Seriously? To me, those outworn concepts sit right alongside changing our clocks twice a year.

Why did this ridiculous concept begin? The culprit was the Standard Time Act in 1918, which attempted to maximize natural light usage. Because it was so controversial, it was repealed in 1919. Then, the time change was reinvented nationally for the 1942-1945 period of WWII. Finally, Lyndon Johnson passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which made the time change national. Only two states, Hawaii and Arizona (minus The Navajo Nation) are exceptions to clock changing. In recent years, Congress has attempted to pass a bill ending Daylight Savings Time but they can’t agree on it. How surprising.

Since my children live in Arizona, we are two hours apart for half the year. When the grandchildren were younger, this was really a problem. By the time the kids were all in bed in Arizona around 8, I was already going to bed in Illinois at 10. When I woke up at 7, it was only 5 in Arizona. It made communication difficult since we all worked during the rest of the day.

Now that we’ve changed our clocks once again, energy saving is negligible since our modern lives include lots of technology, televisions, and air conditioning. Some businesses would argue the extra hour of light in the evening helps their tourism profits. Sadly, that hour doesn’t last long where I live as it continues to get dark earlier after the time switch.

But the biggest problem with changing clocks, fall or spring, is the disruption to our body clocks and circadian rhythm. Like I said, four days of waking up at 6 even though I keep adjusting my time to go to bed at night. Plenty of studies have been done attributing serious health problems to the effects of time changes. Parents with small babies must figure out how to protect their schedule from this change in time too.

I changed seven clocks yesterday, including appliances and my car’s clock, just trying to keep up, and I’ll have to do that again in the spring. I simply go around my house doing this, but there is a cost to our economy to support and maintain the time change in computer systems that run our lives. And to whom is this cost passed on? You guessed it.

Why? Why are we continuing to keep this anachronism?