Garcia Media Life

Our national campaign to increase sleep disorders and make people artificially change their lives so they now have to do early-morning jogs or walk their dogs in total darkness- is coming this Sunday!

I wrote extensively about the change to Daylight Savings time here last year, and I will do so every single year- so much so that when you see a similar rant like this in 2012 and 2013 and 2014 and 2015, it will automatically remind you to change your smoke detector batteries.

It’s just silly, willful self-deception with bogus claims of energy savings and crime reduction. And it kills.

This is not a trivial matter. Studies have found that seasonal changes in the circadian rhythm can be severe and last for weeks. A 2008 study found male suicide rates rose during the three weeks after the change to Savings time. Another study found heart attacks are significantly more common in the first three days after the Spring time-change….

No one has really figured out how much energy it saves. It certainly used to mean savings when the use of incandescent light bulbs was a big deal and more daylight after work meant less use of electricity. But increasingly, our uses of power are not tied to light. We don’t use computers any less because it’s darker in the morning or lighter in the evening.

I also point out that if the benefits of savings time are so great…why go back to standard time at all? Why not stay on one time, forever and ever and stop screwing with our lives? It’s ok to go back in November to five months of wasting energy and committing more crimes?

If I was a clever criminal, I’d set my alarm two hours early and be ready, dark and early Monday morning, for the first jogger or dog-walker who appeared in my sights. For the record, I am not clever, but if I was criminally inclined I’d be too damned tired to get up before 10am, EDT, Monday, anyway so you’ll certainly be safe from me.

Which goes to the whole point about self-deception. Savings time proponents argue…hey…you get a whole hour more light! No, Bunky…you just swapped the daylight at the end of the day for darkness at the start of the day.

A dear reader put it this way recently. Her name is Mary and that’s all I know about her but here’s her comment to my post on this last year….

More daylight? Really….? The days get longer and longer on their own as the solstice approaches….stealing it from the first part of the day does not give any MORE daylight to anyone, just reassigns it to the end of the day. How can we get our morning light back? All of us morning joggers, swimmers, dog walkers etc….we wanna know!

Yeah! What she said.