The big news? Daylight Saving Time may soon be history. “The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the Sleep Research Society and other medical groups have advocated for ending the practice, calling for the adoption of a permanent standard time that would not involve shifting forward each spring and falling back each autumn.”
That’s an important organizational voice for getting rid of Congress’s current jury-rigging scheme for commerce and recreation in America.
It has costs. Imposed on us. On our sleep patterns.
But the passage quoted from CNN was not the news angle that the “Cable News Network” story, by Jacqueline Howard, emphasized.
The deleterious effects of lurching back and forth twice a year is not what CNN headlined. The fact (and commonsense conjecture) that these bi-annual shifts are bad for us? Not as interesting as that it could all be racist.
The title of Howard’s piece is “Daylight Saving Time sheds light on lack of sleep’s disproportionate impact in communities of color.”
The key piece of information? “Growing evidence shows that lack of sleep and sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea, remain more prevalent in Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino communities, and these inequities can have long-term detrimental implications for physical health, even raising the risk of certain chronic diseases.”
If true, this is a political reason to get the Social Engineering Class to finally balk at the pseudo-Saving chronometer-jiggering laws.
But what does that say about said class? (A class not limited to, but somehow paradigmatically represented by, Democrats?) That they don’t care about the harm they do unless it can be shown to accrue predominantly to racial minorities?
There’s something sick here, oddly racist.
But we can accept this nonsense for the win, if it helps stop our ritual springing forward and falling back.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “Time & Tide & Race”
Obviously, harnessing a sense of racial grievance is a rotten thing to do unless the problem originates in racism, and harnessing a sense of racial guilt is always a rotten thing to do. CNN journalists are, of course, social perverts; but I suspect that some of those playing the Race Card in this matter did not act in a belief that Only Some Lives Matter, but were trying — in an ill-advised manner — to motivate greater support for an end to clock-switching.
A majority are in favor of ending clock-switching, but that majority consists of two camps. One camp wants permanent DST; the other a restoration of Standard Time. Permanent DST would represent a massive transfer of wealth, and should be resisted. The beneficiaries would be [1] morning people, [2] those in the hospitality industries, and [3] “progressives” wanting a fig leaf to hide behind after the absurdity of clock-switching is recognized. (This last group will claim that DST was always a good idea, that it just should have been permanent.) Those paying the costs will be everyone else; circadian rhythms of their sort, which implicitly played a rôle in the standardization of business hours, will have been discounted. The costs of correcting business hours for the effects of a clock-shift are prohibitive, which is why DST got people doing things an hour earlier on a temporary basis.
Why not simply agree that all time will be stated as GMT in the 24 hour format, allowing individuals and businesses to select and post their hours, appointments and events in that format, as they please?
There is no need to be in lockstep, even within what will become archaic “time zones”.
The concepts of noon and midnight historically and naturally were, until standardization, local. They can regain that status and need not be tied to a clock.
All that is really necessary is to know when to report to work, be at an airport or available for the call, now zoom meeting.
Various regions, commonly on the far western side of time zones, have already varied for the zone standards and functioned quite well. Such occurs in Michigan and Indiana presently.
Freedom, liberty and self-determination regarding such matters are okay by me, and do not appear to be racist, at least on first glance.
Humanity, I suspect, might be able to adapt (with the help of their governments, of course).
Cheers!
The idea of GMT might have worked in an earlier time and it works for the military today, but with mass communication, time zones are not really ‘archaic’. In order to be available for the next zoom meeting, , there needs to be a certain amount of standardization in how time is measured. The same holds true for broadcast media. How local should it be? Would noon in NYC and noon in Allentown, PA be several minutes apart? How then do people living in different locales coordinate their meetings?
As I noted, people conform to DST because the cost of rescheduling by an hour relative to the clock is prohibitively high. Adoption of a universal time (GMT or somesuch) would make those terrible costs unavoidable. And a persisting result would be a loss of expectation, as one traveled, about business hours, again bringing great costs. (Most of our transactions are with businesses neither regarded as businesses nor as customers.)
Sorry, I meant to write “businesses neither regarded as employers nor as customers”.
All this fixation on clocks and telling a specific time is a racist western cultural fixation. It presumes that a culture that holds people and society to having activities occur at specific intervals is somehow superior. And if the culture is superior because of that, it opens up all kinds of questions about other ways that the culture is superior. Which just undermines the whole narrative. Which then HAS to be racist in order to make people not question.