Take time to make time

Come with me back to the American landscape of fall, 1973. Let's see. Spiro Agnew, the Shame Of Maryland, was forced out of the vice-president's office over his crooked schemes that saw him pocketing bagsful of bribe money from contractors in the very office that should have seen him getting ready to become president, because Richard Nixon's second term was coming unraveled like a pair of socks from Woolworth's.

Syria and Egypt attacked Israel on the Yom Kippur holiday, seeking to regain territory lost in the 1967 Six Day War. The fighting lasted from October 6 through the 25th. Nixon came to Israel's defense, sending military aid to the region, and ordering U.S. aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean. 

As a result, oil-producing nations in the Persian Gulf announced an embargo on oil sales to the U.S. and several other countries. As a result of that, the price of oil here went from $3 a barrel to $12, and gasoline prices doubled - when you could find it. By Christmas, shortages were showing up at gas stations, and so were gas lines, where you sat in your car for an hour waiting to get $5 worth of Gulf No-Nox.

For the first time ever, people were paying attention to something called an energy crisis, and Nixon's people took steps such as asking us not to put out Christmas lights, and keeping Daylight Savings Time in effect permanently. What a great idea, everyone said in October!

And then, in December and January, when little Lisa and Bob Jr were outside waiting for the school bus in the pitch dark, all heck broke loose, and what was supposed to be a two-year "experiment" was called off in early 1974.

So, proving once again that many of us don't learn from the past, the U.S. Senate has passed a proposed law that would mean no more changing the clocks twice a year in order to bring us a "new, permanent standard time" that would bring us brighter winter evenings. They did not say exactly who needs all that sunlight at dinnertime in December. The candle industry would not like that idea, and neither would the fire departments that remind people to change the batteries in smoke detectors in fall when they change their clocks.

"The good news is if we can get this passed, we don't have to keep doing this stupidity anymore," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., author of the bill to end the practice of switching twice a year.  He's also a climate-change denier, so there's that.

Dr. Beth Malow is a neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has spoken about this topic with an interesting twist: she agrees that it's not healthy to change the clocks twice a year, so she advocates leaving them alone, at standard time permanently.

"It's called standard time because ST lines up with our natural, biological rhythms," she says. That would mean more sunny mornings and more dark evenings for those who get up early such as students and old men with cats.

Anyway, there's no telling what the House might do with this, even if they ever take it up.  And I think of the person who complained that his blanket was not long enough to cover his shoulders, so he cut some off the bottom and sewed it to the top.