April 2, 2006

In about 6 hours a historic event will take place in Indiana. For the first time in 40 years, the entire state will observe Daylight Saving Time* (DST) along with 47 other states of the Union. Since I have lived in Indiana for all of my 21 years, I have never observed this and don't know much about it. Therefore, I did a little research to become more knowledgable about this biennial occurrence with which I am forced to comply. This is what I found:

The concept of DST was proposed by Benjamin Franklin to, as the current name suggests, maximize the use of the luminescence provided by our sun and save on candles and oil which were used to provide artificial light sources (he probably also wanted more people to listen to him and be early to bed, early to rise, ...). While saving these materials was a good idea, the concept of removing and adding time was fundamentally flawed and Franklin's proposal was rejected. That is, of course, until recently. DST was enforced by the federal government circa WWI in order to conserve the necessary resources to create electricity. Within a year, however, the law was repealed. FDR called for a forward shift of the clocks for 3 years during WWII for similar reasons as those circa WWI. After WWII, the practice became inconsistent among the states and was confusing for the increasing number of travelers. To alleviate this problem, in 1966 the Uniform Time Act was issued for nationwide observance of the time switch. However, individual states could disregard this law by passing their own law saying they didn't have to abide by it; this tells me that the Uniform Time Act was basically a suggestion.

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Until Governor Mitch Daniels got some political power to pass some legal something last year (he has a daughter who goes to Purdue, by the way, but I still think he's the worst Indiana Governor of my lifetime), Indiana was one of the few states in the Union sane enough to pay zero attention to DST. But this spring the sun will be right overhead at 1:00 p.m. and later in the summer won't set until 9:30 or 10:00 p.m.. Thank you, Mitch Daniels, for rejecting logic and ruining 40 years of tradition in Indiana.

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I have always thought that DST was one of the least practical ideas ever. Time is constant. How can any sane person try to adjust the measurement of a constant? If I wanted to lose an hour and then gain it back later I would drive to Illinois and back. Some people who care more about DST than I do performed studies and found that DST reduces total traffic accidents in the United States by nearly 1%. However, it might be easier to reduce the number of accidents and would decrease the number by more than 1% if people stopped applying makeup, eating, or talking on their cell phones while driving. Others claim that the day can be better utilized if a larger part of the waking hours were during daylight hours. I am not sure this is true, because it sounds like personal opinion. As a result, I will rebut this argument with my personal opinion that if you want to make better use of the day you should wake up earlier and spare me the inconvenience of shifting my clocks and my sleep schedule twice a year.

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Ultimately, aside from those who have sleep disorders and cannot quickly adjust to the effects of DST, the time shift is just an inconvenience. However, this inconvenience has caused many problems worldwide as evidenced in part right here. By the way, because of George W. Bush next year the USA will jump ahead before St. Patrick's Day.

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*The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, but many feel that appending an 's' to Saving is easier to say and, as a result, is also accepted.