One morning when I shuffled carefully down the driveway by flashlight in the dark toward my neighbor waiting with her flashlight, I asked her, “Tell me again: why do we do this?”

She said, “They say it’s supposed to be good for us.”

I asked, “Are ‘they’ the same people who told us margarine was better than butter? Or coffee was good, then bad, then good? Or wine was bad, then good, and now bad again?”

We chose to go the shorter steepest route, because we find it easier when we can’t see how steep it is.

As the light increases each day in February, we start dreading the time change. When we were kids, it changed to Daylight Saving in April, and then it changed back to Standard Time in October. Some time in early adulthood years, the changes got moved to March and November, so that Daylight Saving is a now longer stretch than Standard. So “Standard” is more accurately “Nonstandard”, or “Irregular”.

Like with most big issues, we Americans are evenly divided on which time schedule is best. In general, urbanites prefer more light in the evening, and rural folks prefer (and often NEED) more light in the morning. Almost everyone agrees that jerking our internal clocks around is annoying at best, and dangerous at worst. (The dummies think they are somehow tricking Father Time into providing more hours of daylight.)

I expect that in spite of widespread discontent and the adverse consequences of a twice-yearly time change, the People in Charge will do nothing. Politicians are so concerned with retaining votes that they are paralyzed when decisions are a 50/50 proposal, with the unintended consequence of everyone being unhappy. In addition to the elected officials, it is often the bureaucrats who end up interfering in our lives.

I expect to be walking in the dark for the rest of my life.

“You’ll never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” —Thomas Sowell