You are not alone …
You are not alone, gentle reader. Everyone is opposed to Daylight Savings Time.
Like so many bad ideas, the measure was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but after being ignored as too silly even by the French revolutionists, it was borne into the world by the Kaiser in 1916. The idea, I suppose, was to make Catholics miss Sunday Mass, at least once a year, and possibly twice. The unintended consequences included the disruption of sleep patterns, travel schedules, record keeping, medical and all other automatic equipment, while spreading chaos between adjoining political jurisdictions, and gratuitous civic aggravation within the larger ones. It was remarkably successful, and as all other progressive schemes, any attempt to fix it creates additional complications, while confirming the transfer of moral onus from the Individual to the State. (Cf. “Obamacare reform.”) I deny the argument that anything so obviously inspired by dark supernatural forces can be “well-intended.”
In its theological dimension, this “DST” also provides evidence that the Devil is capable of foresight, for with the development of digitized clock displays that cannot be simply adjusted but require consulting some sans-serif, fine print, and probably lost manual with instructions translated by non-native speakers from Korean through Chinese, we now have semi-annual clock-adjustment nightmares among the cybernetically unintuitive. Which is to say, everyone.
True, I am sometimes criticized for omitting the qualifier “almost” before universally inclusive terms, but make no apology. One must not grant concessions to demonic agencies, whose lawyers are constantly text-searching for opportunities to raise asinine objections. Our project should be to induce “psychiatric flooding” in them, to lift each boat off its final mooring, each door off its final hinge, as Donald J. Trump seems to understand. (I may not like him much myself, but am getting in the habit of deferring to the man with the best enemies list I have ever seen.) May I suggest replacing “everyone,” whenever challenged, with, “every God-fearing Christian.”
This morning’s other modest proposal is that all who oppose Daylight Savings Time — which is to say, every God-fearing Christian — should appear one hour early for work through spring and summer, then one hour late through fall and winter, or vice versa by personal whim, continuously until the system collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. This is unfinished business from the Great War.
Meanwhile, the campanologists are advised to ring the church bells a little louder and longer, so no one misses the Mass.
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A correspondent cites an unnamed Indian chief in Arizona: “Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.”