Saving daylight
(CORRECTION: An editorial Monday misstated the dates of extended daylight saving time. Beginning in 2007, daylight saving will start on the second Sunday in March.)
HAS THE country has become so polarized that even a subject as seemingly benign as daylight saving time can ignite debate along the red-blue divide?
The 1,700-page energy bill Congress just passed extends daylight saving time by four weeks, so that, starting in 2007, the late sunsets will begin three weeks earlier, on the third Sunday in March, and end a week later, on the first Sunday in November.
Unsurprisingly, the amendment making the change was cosponsored by a Massachusetts liberal, US Representative Edward Markey, who promised it would save energy, reduce crime, boost the economy, and ''give everyone a sunny outlook and a spring in their step." But the expansion was hotly opposed by farmers, President Bush, rural states, utilities, and the Association of Christian Schools. They complained it would disrupt airline schedules, rob farmers of morning light to get their crops to market, and be dangerous for children waiting for school buses in the dark.
The state of Indiana, one of three states that refuse to participate in daylight saving time at all (and that straddles two time zones), roundly defeated a legislative proposal to join the daylight club this year. Indiana state Representative Chet Dobis, speaking in thinly veiled code, summarized the opposition this way, according to Governing magazine: ''Who wants daylight time? It's all the folks from high tech, all the folks from the media, all the folks who think there's a benefit to being associated with New York City when, in fact, we're hundreds of miles closer to Chicago."
It does appear that the latte-sipping Northeast (plus Seattle) would benefit most from the change. The Southern states don't really need the psychic boost out of grim gray winters that the extra hour of light provides; in March and November, after all, the sun already sets later in Florida than in Maine.
Historically as well, daylight saving has had more support in traditional urban centers than in middle America and the South. It was New York City that kept the idea alive by adopting a local daylight ordinance in 1919, after the federal government had abandoned its brief experiment with time tinkering during World War I. It was 47 years before the rest of the country caught up, with the Uniform Time Act of 1966.
But there is more to the politics of daylight saving than simple geography. Setting the clocks ahead mostly benefits night-crawling revelers while penalizing the virtuous, who are early to bed and early to rise. It is a Washington-knows-best mandate resisted by rugged individuals who like their clocks the way God set them. We see it differently here in New England. Stretching spring evenings by one luminous hour isn't big government -- it's good government.
