The Annual Silliness

I've never been a fan of Daylight Savings Time--not to the point that, like one elderly relative-by-marriage, I refuse to set my clock ahead and do the arithmetic in my head whenever I'm supposed to be somewhere at a particular DST time, but I'll sometimes offer some mild criticism when the topic comes up. Deciding that every summer we're going to change our clocks and call 1:30 2:30 and then call our renaming of the hours "daylight saving" has always seemed silly, if not faintly arrogant, to me. And certainly pointless. The day is still the same number of hours it would have without our change; summer days are longer because of perfectly natural occurrences that go on no matter what number is showing on our clocks. And I never bought the notion (which I was told as a child) that DST was done for the benefit of farmers. Why would farmers care what time it is? They are going to get up whenever they have to to get their work done. I always figured it was really done for the benefit of suburb-dwellers who work in cities (and, let's be honest, congressmen) who wanted a little extra time by the pool when they get home on weekdays.

Imagine my pleasure Friday when I saw John J. Miller's NRO article on DST. In addition to pointing out the general nonsensical nature of the whole thing and providing some history (it's educational; I never knew we'd had DST before the 60s, for instance), he says that farmers were actually opposed to it. I knew I was right! In your face, purveyors of unthought-out answers to children!

http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200504010806.asp