my annual daylight savings rant

Over the years, supporters of Daylight Savings Time have advanced new reasons to support it, even though they were not the original reasons behind enacting DST.

One they say is safety. Some people believe that if we have more daylight at the end of the day, we will have fewer accidents.

In fact, this "benefit" comes only at the cost of less daylight in the morning. When year-round daylight time was tried in 1973, one reason it was repealed was because of an increased number of school bus accidents in the morning. Further, a study of traffic accidents throughout Canada in 1991 and 1992 by Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia before, during, and immediately after the so-called "spring forward" when DST begins in April. Alarmingly, he found an eight percent jump in traffic accidents on the Monday after clocks are moved ahead. He attributes the jump to the lost hour of sleep. In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Coren explained, "These data show that small changes in the amount of sleep that people get can have major consequences in everyday activities." He undertook the study as a follow up to research showing that even an hour's change can disrupt sleep patterns and "persist for up to five days after each time shift." Other observers attribute the huge spike in accidents on the first Monday of DST to the sudden change in the amount of light during driving times. Regardless of the reason, there is no denying that changing our clocks has a significant cost in human lives.

While some people claim that they would miss the late evening light, a presumably similar number of people love the morning light. And projects, postponed during the sun filled summer, will be tackled with new vigor when the sun sets an hour earlier each day.

Congress appears to have felt we were not having enough of a difficult time so in 2007 they passed a law starting Daylight Savings time 3 weeks earlier and ending it one week later. This will cost US companies billions to reset automated equipment, put us further out of sync with Asia and Africa time-wise, inconvenience most of the country, all in the name of unproven studies that claim we save energy.

One farmer on the radio said today, his herd of about 300 milking cows are startled. They muuhhed and looked at him in a disgruntled way: "What the heck are you doing so early in the barn?" He then decided to take it easy ... just an half hour earlier for one week. Thereafter switching to the change ...

In my view we should start a campaign to stop this madness. It is bad enough that the government taxes us out of existence, but taking away our "time" with flawed reasonings of "saving something" is too much to bear.

My friends, conspiracy theories left me lukewarm in the past. But now they are gaining momentum. I believe that "daylight savings time" is just a cover up for a psychological experiment, ordained by the government, to see how successful a few people can influence the masses without the "common man" to object. "Daylight Savings" is an illusion, a fabrication of the second world war when electricity was scarce during production times. With our factories presently illuminated 24 hours a day, we don't need this "savings" bullshit anymore.