Trego's Mountain Ear

I was in high school when they passed Daylight Savings Time.  Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act of 1966 into law.  To be brutally frank, I didn’t regard LBJ as one of our great presidents – there’s still a distant echo that translates to “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” 

A couple years ago, Marco Rubio proposed making Daylight Savings Time year around.   If I’m remembering correctly, we went through that already back in 1974-75.  Kind of sucked up here in the northern reaches – and it was probably worse for folks in Alaska.  Still, with both Johnson and Rubio screwing with the clocks, we at least have evidence that both political parties want to shaft us. 

I spent my first sixteen years without Daylight Savings Time, and I can’t say I ever woke up thinking that getting up an hour earlier would improve my life.  Benjamin Franklin thought it might be a useful idea that would save on the cost of candles – but I’m modern and have electric lights.  The other aspect of Daylight Savings Time is geographic – keeping Montana in a single time zone means that our time zone line has been moved a bit westerly.  And we have it good compared to the Idaho folks:

I think that if the time zone didn’t follow our state boundaries, the point of change would be somewhere between Trego and Eureka – I’m not complaining about where the time zone is.  I’m just pointing out that, from the perspective of when solar noon occurs, we’re essentially on year-round Daylight Savings Time already.  It’s different for folks in Glasgow or Sidney or Havre.  Montana’s a long state when you look at it from east to west.

I’ve lived with Daylight Savings for 80% of my life.  I can handle a few more years of it.  But the fact that Ben Franklin saved on candles in Philadelphia is offset by the fact that Philly is 9 degrees south of us.  And just because Lyndon Johnson and Adolf Hitler both agreed that Daylight Savings Time was a good idea doesn’t make it so. 

Spring ahead, Fall back.