MEADS: Return To God’s Time By Rejecting The Senate’s Plan To Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Not only can the American people be bribed by Congress with their own money in the form of handouts and COVID-cash, it appears we can even be bribed by our very own time. On Tuesday, a bipartisan duo of Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the “Sunshine Protection Act.” Currently, Americans are in Daylight Saving Time from March through November. From November through March, we’re in Standard Time. Under the Sunshine Protection Act, we would not revert back to Standard Time in November 2023. It would make Daylight Saving Time permanent forever.

After unanimously passing the Senate, it now heads to Congress for final approval before making its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, if approved.

It is being widely praised, but a look at God, government, and science would tell us this bill is not what is needed. We should do away with changing our clocks twice a year, but our country needs to be on Standard Time forever due to some critical reasons of health, national pride, and in accordance with God.

A look at the history of Daylight Saving Time would lead one to conclude that the federal government screwed all of this up in the first place. Their new plan would irrevocably put the country on an artificial time contrived by government busybodies who should have never gotten involved with it to begin with.

Let us start with something right away — contrary to popular belief, American farmers were not behind the impetus for Daylight Saving Time. They actually hated it.

Why?

Well, Cows don’t care what time the clock says or if it is dark or light. They need to be milked when they need to be milked. The introduction of Daylight Saving Time — moving the clock ahead one hour for more light in the evening— meant that farmers were tending the cows in the dark in the early morning.

So, if farmers were not behind it, then who was? Like all unholy things, it was a marriage of big government in bed with big business.

Throughout the 19th century, there wasn’t exactly a standard time in the United States, The New York Times recently reported. In Boston it could be 12:15, then 12:10 in New York City, and so on and so forth.

But with the advent of the railroads, that made selling tickets and planning arrival and departure times rather difficult. So — in an effort to stave off government interference on the matter — the railroad industry implemented its own timezone and standard time.

According to The New York Times, Evangelical Christians were largely opposed to it. They felt that it was messing with the natural order of things and the railroads had no place doing so, but it didn’t matter.

That business-oriented concept of time stuck until 1916 during World War I. Germany instituted Day Light Saving Time to save energy costs by having more daylight hours.

Western nations soon followed and in 1918, the United States Congress, in a moment of globalist fervor, said, “Not a bad a idea, let’s be like the rest of the world!” They took over time zones and implemented a Daylight Savings plan, which was the first year Americans lost sleep in the spring.

According to historian, Michael Downing, the move was not popular:

“When the Congress poked its finger into the face of every clock in the country, millions of Americans winced,” Downing wrote. “United by a determination to beat back the big hand of government,” daylight saving time opponents  “raised holy hell, vowing to return the nation to real time, normal time, farm time, sun time—the time they liked to think of as “God’s time.’”

But remember, if pros and cons are opposite, then the opposite of progress must be Congress.

The federal government barreled ahead with it for the most part for one year but actually allowed states to decide whether to adopt the matter altogether beginning in 1919 until World War II. Then, DST was re-implemented federally. In 1966, Congress formally adopted the Uniform Time Act to make the change from DST-ST permanent.

A version of that bill has dictated to all Americans for half of a century how to set our clocks.

But, Rubio and Whitehouse’s bill looks to end it by making DST permanent, with some exceptions. Standard Time, or natural time, would for the most part be abolished.

Now, we have talked about God, and we’ve talked about people who think they’re gods (the government), but what do scientific experts have to say on the matter? Do they agree with the Rubio and Whitehouse bill?

Not all of them do. Some experts believe that DST is dangerous because it disrupts the natural circadian rhythm. In other words, some doctors believe our body is more naturally in sync with Standard Time.

“In the spring, you are essentially losing an hour of sleep when that clock moves forward in the middle of the night,” Dr. James Wyatt, a clinical sleep disorder specialist at Rush University Medical Center, recently told PBS.

“But another thing that happens is that you are waking up at an earlier time relative to your body’s circadian system. You are trying to be awake with sleep deprivation at an earlier clock time. And then the circadian system thinks it’s daytime,” Wyatt said. “Fundamentally, [daylight saving time] is putting more strain on your body causing heart attacks and strokes.”

Dr. Sabra Abbott, a sleep medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine, concurred with that assessment.

“It is much healthier to get more of that light in the morning than in the evening,” Abbot advised.

“There are a lot of studies that show that if you live in the Western side of the time zone, where you are getting less of that morning light, there are higher rates of cancer, depression rates go up if you don’t have that morning light,” she continued. “So, as a community, the sleep field feels like standard time year-round is the best approach.”

So there you have it. The Rubio and Whitehouse plan to make DST permanent is an abomination to Americans, science, and morality. It seems as if the government is doing something good. But they aren’t. They’re forcing everybody to jump aboard a concept of time that it created in the first place.

The bill should be amended to make “standard time”  — not DST — permanent. That is the natural order of things.

A keen reader might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. Evangelicals were opposed to timezones as a whole. Shouldn’t we get rid of those too to be on so-called God’s time?” Well, the author of this piece is Catholic, not a fundamentalist, so that ecumenical difference is going to have to be compromised, lest a religious debate in the comments section breakout.

In short, let’s not be bribed with our own time. The government took it, now they’re trying to give a cheapened version of it back.

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