Daylight Savings Should Be Made Permanent

You know what was awesome? Yesterday. Yesterday was the first Daylight Savings day of the year, and the first Daylight Savings day of the year always feels like someone released you from a Siberian prison. The sun shone gold upon the melting snow. Children frolicked out on the street. Neighbors walked around the 'hood and said hi to each other. Beethoven's Pastoral symphony spontaneously began playing from the heavens. Outdoor happy hours are coming! SKIRTS! BY GOD, SKIRTS WILL SOON APPEAR!

All of this was made possible simply by moving our clocks forward one hour. So, it stands to reason that we should keep our clocks ahead one hour ALL THE FUCKING TIME. It should always be lighter one hour later, making Daylight Savings Time permanent. (Yes, you are currently in DST. When the clock falls back, you are technically on "normal" time.) You already know that Daylight Savings is wasteful and fucks with everyone, but it's not the later hour that screws with our business hours and the ability of our children to go to bed at a reasonable hour … it's the twice-annual SHIFT between DST and non-DST that is unnecessary and horrible. We have manipulated time itself in a way that does nothing beneficial whatsoever. We should be manipulating time to kill Hitler, not help out sorghum farmers. We should just pick one time-shift and stick with it.

As for darker mornings, I don't give a shit. Mornings are already horrible. Getting up before dawn only reinforces the point. I can deal with it being dark in the morning in January because, as of right now, it's dark ANYWAY when I gotta get up. Turning off Daylight Savings does not spare anyone from the existential agony of waking up in a black void. If you get up at 6:30 a.m., it's gonna be dark no matter what. And once you had your coffee and a bowl of cereal, you've adjusted, and everything is fine. I'm happy to keep it dark until 8:30 if that means more sunshine at Happy Hour.

So let's do this. Let's make the day start and end later, so that America's working citizens can walk out at 5 p.m. and not want to commit seppuku. It's the right thing.

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