As Ronald Reagan used to say, “Here we go again.” Here we go again with another bi-annual fiddling with the clocks. It’s an ornerous and fruitless task. You can no more save daylight than you can save a bubble. Yet we pretend that this is the way it should be, as in Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery.” In it, as many know, all the friendly folk of a flower-smelling, well scrubbed village gather on the village square one day in every June to stone to death an entire family, babies, teens, grandparents, the family.
A citizen of the village, while stoning, pondered aloud the wisdom of this annual atrocity and was rebuked by an old guy. “We’ve always done this and, by Jove, we always will. You’re not to question what we’ve always done.”
Of course there are things that this clock meddling accomplishes, like irritating the livestock, making household pets nervous, causing a significant number of people to be late- or early, depending on how they interpret “spring forward ” or fall back.” Or just forget. Is the moon involved in this?
Bill Bartram, Lima
