One Nation Under Jetlag

Let me begin by saying I didn’t grow up with daylight time change, in a rural nation. I don’t remember – exactly – our electricity consumption being particularly high, either. Okay, this might have something to do with the fact that when I was very small there was maybe one lightbulb per room, and it didn’t so much illuminate as cast deeper shadows. Also, we had blackouts and brownouts so often everyone kept an oil lamp or ten handy. But never mind that…

The point is that when daylight savings time came, I was excited. We were now more like the more industrialized nations…

It didn’t take me long to become very tired of it, though, and wonder what exactly it serves. Look, I know old Franklin thought he was onto something. Something about people using up candles at night, while in bed in morning while daylight was on, or what gives.

If Franklin came home now, he’d get the shock of his life. We have become to a great extent the nation that never sleeps. All the time change does, is now I’m getting up while it’s still dark, and using then the light I save in the evening. Yeah, this makes sense. Besides, illumination is no longer our primary form of energy consumption. There’s computers, for instance, which in this house often go on before the lights do. And there’s cars. And trains. And airplanes. And even in illumination, how many office buildings leave the lights on all night? Most factories work around the clock. Retail shops most of the time (except for people blessed with a downtown shopping area, really) have no windows, so the light is on all the time.

And yet the bad idea heard around the world keeps going on, proving nothing is harder to kill than the misfiring of a misguided genius. Is there any savings? Unlikely. Does it equal confusion, absenteeism and man-hours devoted to changing non-digital clocks? Ah! But like the law of the Medes and the Persians it shall be obeyed.

And if I needed one, just one example of what’s wrong with planned economies and top down control, I’d use this.

Benjamin Franklin was a genius. No one disputes that. But even a genius can’t know about everyone’s profession, even in his own time. Oh, sure, he made a difference in the factories of the nascent industrial revolution – maybe. But the farmers of his time got up with the sun and couldn’t care less for his time. And farmers were most of the population in that era.

As far as I can tell he made it easier on people like himself: early risers, who liked to read and whose vision was starting to fail. And THAT was before technology made his society and all the rhythms of it as divorced from our life as the life of Rome or Greece were from his. No, possibly more.

Had his bad idea been limited to persuading a state or two to do this, we’d have gotten over it already. Instead, he made it a national law. And other nations who wanted to copy us and didn’t know which parts were relevant (bill of rights, guys, bill of rights) went ahead and did it too. And now all around the world, people spend two weeks every year stumbling around, sleepy and confused, and – those who know – wishing Franklin had got zapped while playing with lightning.