If you live with a cat, you may be
under some duress at present. Cats, you
see, don’t submit to most of our silly human notions. This idea of setting our clocks back by one
hour, in particular, is not settling well with my 20 pounds of house cat.
As far as my cat is concerned,
breakfast time is breakfast time. In the
name of daylight saving time, we can
set our clocks to any old time we want, but he expects me feed him at the same
time I fed him last week and the week before.
Surprisingly enough, one of my idols, Benjamin
Franklin, first entertained the idea of setting clocks ahead each spring and
back each fall in an essay entitled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the
Cost of Light.” The essay was
published in 1784. Obviously, Franklin
did not consult his cat while writing the treatise. The idea was largely ignored for the next
100-plus years. Finally, in 1916, the
British Parliament introduced “British Summer Time,” the very idea Franklin had
suggested.
Again, no housecats were consulted.
In 1918, the U.S. House of
Representatives voted in favor of seasonally adjusting our clocks. I won’t go into all of the details, but a lot
of public outcry followed. The American
polity rejected the notion of tinkering with “God’s time.” Eventually, the federal government allowed
state and local governments do decide on adopting or rejecting daylight saving
time. In 1966 Congress enacted the
Uniform Time Act. The idea was to encourage
states to uniformly observe the time change.
Even given that, Hawaii, Arizona, and some U.S. territories still take
exception and leave time unchanged.
So here we are today. The time change has pulled the rug out from
under my 20 pounds of housecat.
He is definitely a “God’s time” sympathizer.
--Mitchell Hegman
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