RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IT'S TIME TO CHANGE TIME TO REAL TIME

Try and figure this out: Does daylight-saving time really save daylight? Or does it just shuffle the hours around like Congress messing with budgets?

A lot of things don't make sense until someone with the right information offers a satisfactory explanation. You have tried and tried, but no one has been able to explain why the clocks have to be changed every six months.

As soap boxes go, this is about the best one around. Here it is just mid-afternoon, and it is already dark. Does this make sense?

(Gentle reader, do not be alarmed. You aren't necessarily reading this in the dark of night. You, like many others, may be an early riser. There is a good chance you are reading this in the dark of dawn, although the time change has hurried up the sun a bit as the days grow colder.)

There have been, over the centuries, enough problems dividing up the world into time zones. While these provide some guidance and organization for telling time everywhere, it is far from a perfect system.

For example, let's say you live in western Kansas, which is right next to the dividing line between the Central time zone and the Mountain time zone. If you follow the grand scheme, your clocks will be set an hour ahead of your next-door neighbor, who, in western Kansas, may be 25 miles to the west in Colorado.

So your neighbor says, "I'll come by and pick you up for work at around 6:30 in the morning, OK?" And you say OK, because you need a ride to work. You watch out the window at 6:30 for your neighbor's pickup (everyone in western Kansas and eastern Colorado drives a pickup) and there is no sign of that rooster tail of dust kicked up by a speeding four-wheel-drive pickup (all the pickups in western Kansas and eastern Colorado are four-wheel-drive).

After about 15 minutes you call your neighbor to see what the heck is going on. Your telephone call wakes him out of a dead sleep, and he gets pretty doggone irritated. "Why are you calling in the middle of the night?" he says in a real growlly voice. "Whaddaya mean? You're 15 minutes late already," you yell back.

See how the time zones can ruin a neighborly friendship?

Or consider this. The nearest big town to you and your neighbor, assuming you are still in western Kansas, is Denver, which is still three or four hours away. Denver is on Mountain time, and you are on Central time. So you get the Denver paper and find out "Law and Order" is on at 9 p.m., and you click on the TV at 9 p.m. and something else is on, something you don't care for at all. You yell at the dog and kick the goat (everyone in western Kansas has a pet goat) and say foul things about TV stations and how they can't follow a simple schedule. Of course, the Denver station knows good and well that it isn't really 9 p.m. yet, unless you are in western Kansas, and who would want to live where everyone drives a four-wheel-drive pickup and has a pet goat?

This is just scratching the surface on this time-change business. To make matters worse, just about the time you figure out time zones, the Congress of the United States of America butts in and says not to get to comfortable with the time, because you have to change it in the middle of the night twice a year.

If Congress is involved, you would think there would be some logical explanation for how we mess around with the clocks all the time. Of all the things Congress does, this is the one thing -- perhaps the one and only thing -- that ought to have some simple, easy-to-understand explanation.

But ask anyone up there in Washington to justify changing the clocks and remembering which way the hands go in the spring and in the autumn, and immediately those folks start babbling about secret budgets and why junkets to Arruba are in the national interest and how they never, ever voted for above-ground nuclear testing in forests that are the habitat of spotted birds of some kind. They avoid talking about time changes like they would a "nay" vote on motherhood.

What would happen if you just didn't reset your clocks? Ever. Just keep plodding through life like your wife's Aunt Della and Uncle Alf, who always knew when to turn on "The Lawrence Welk Show" by the shadows on the living-room wall and other easy-to-understand natural indicators, like chickens roosting and hunger pangs and seeing the Presbyterian minister drive by on his way home for supper.

Those folks up there in Washington may think it's a big deal to balance the budget and so on, but they ought to take care of this time thing. As the campaigns heat up for next year's elections, it looks like this would be something easy for the politicians and wannabe-politicians to fix. It sure would look good to voters.

And there isn't a voter in the country who thinks this time change twice a year is a good deal. Well, at least all the voters in western Kansas and eastern Colorado.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.