Chris Wells

Dear Newspaper Formerly Known as The Macon Telegraph:

 

            It is remarkable that in the recent election not a single politician addressed the issue that would have most likely influenced my vote and, no doubt, those of many other thoughtful citizens: Daylight Savings Time (DST).  There are a lot of very good reasons to get rid of it and to adopt Daylight Spending Time.  

 

First, we all have to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to change our clocks twice a year. What idiot decided to make us get up in the middle of the night on a weekend to do this? Why not “spring forward” on a Friday at 4 pm, so we’d get off work early, and then fall back at 8:30 a.m. on a Monday so that we could show up late for work and still be on time? 

 

But it’s not just the inconvenience. DST’s extra hours of daylight leads to a lot of harmful consequences. The State of Indiana knows this and has gone on record several times in opposition to DST. Years ago the Indiana legislature rightly refused to go along with it because the extra hour of daylight would burn the corn crops and dehydrate the hogs. (Apparently our Georgia legislature is dominated by folks dumber than Hoosiers and who only care about their afternoon golf games.)  Even though we don’t grow a lot of corn or hogs, we worry about DST causing skin cancer, more kudzu and faster deterioration of our roofs. It’s just as if the fool politicians decided to move us all closer to the sun.

 

Some politicians do think at least a little about skin cancer and global warming. If they'd just think a little harder, they would see that global warming is all tied up with DST -- more sunlight, more heat; more heat, more global warming, death and disease. We older voters recall the good old days of regular daylight, when we didn’t worry about sun screen or global warming, except the kind the Russkies might cause by nuclear holocaust.

 

Our politicians have the solution to global warming right at their fingertips. Every year they make us add daylight hours, and later they make us reduce them. If they would just focus on something other than sending inappropriate emails, gay marriage bans and lying about the other party, they could kill two problems with one law that permanently reverses DST – let’s call it “Daylight Spending Time.”

 

We should all turn our clocks back an hour or two permanently so we would subtract an hour or two of daylight. Without the sun beating down so much every day, things ought to cool off pretty quick, especially in the Georgia summers.  Less sun might be hard on the golf course business, but that's what floodlights and bankers are for. The benefits would be enormous -- less skin cancer, less kudzu, longer roof life, no global warming, and no melting polar icecaps. Best of all, though, would be SUVs for everybody. America would be back in the clover.  And if we didn’t tell the rest of the world about Daylight Spending Time, we could get an edge on the competition. 

 

Sincerely,

Chris Wells