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Did you remember to spring forward this morning, or are you running an hour late? Jonathon and I remembered, but the clock lied. It says we got up at 6:00 A. M., but my body knew it was really 5:00 A. M. The sun knew the truth, because it wasn’t up yet either.
Maybe I wouldn’t take daylight saving time (and yes, saving, not savings is the original phrasing) so hard if I hadn’t been raised without it. A good portion of Indiana doesn’t observe this artificial mess. We all got along just fine without rearranging our clocks, thank you very much. Since I’ve lived without government mandated clock tampering, and saw no ill effects from it, I’m puzzled why most of the country gives into it all.
The true irony to me is that the concept was invented by Benjamin Franklin. A man who was notorious for staying up into the wee hours of the night, or morning as it were, and sleeping until noon. Yes, I know he did the famous quote, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” But Mr. Franklin quoted a lot of stuff he didn’t actually do in his own life.
On one morning after the night before, a very late night, he woke to find his room ablaze with sunlight. His first thought was that his room must be full of the new oil lamps. Then he realized to his shock that it was the sun. In the humorous essay he wrote about this event, he said that he didn’t realize the sun rose so early. He proposed, as a joke, that we change our clocks to accommodate the earlier rising of the sun as the year progresses. His tongue was firmly in cheek. It was a joke folks. A joke, I tell you!
But as so often happens what one man says in jest, someone else simply takes as fact and runs with it. What began as a humorous essay published in a French publication, has become the law of the land in the United States of America. Ben Franklin rarely saw the light of day before noon, if he had a choice. So I say, curse you Ben Franklin, curse you. For rousing all the rest of us out of our beds before dawn, when, if you were still alive and well, you’d still be sleeping until noon.