Gloom, Gloom, Go Away

By Walter Kirn

It happens every year around this time: the days grow short, and people get depressed. Both breakfast and dinner are consumed in darkness, and sometimes even the latter half of lunch. By 5 p.m. in the northern tier of states, cars and trucks are driving with their high beams, and by 7 the brightest objects in the landscape are television screens in living-room windows flashing news of the latest random shooting or reminding the public to get its flu shots. The official start of winter in late December may still be six or seven weeks away, but the psychological winter has begun, triggered by the waning of the light.

This year, with so many other things to fret about--terrorism, the threat of war, a potential double-dip recession and a widespread jumpiness that causes every noise louder than a twig snap to resound in the mind like an atomic blast--I'm wondering if we can afford the added burden of protracted physical gloom. Nighttime is a bad time (ask ancient man, who feared the world was ending with every eclipse), and winter--whose only real value nowadays is to provide atmosphere for the holidays, after which it hangs on endlessly like a Christmas tree that has lost its needles--is the worst time for extra nighttime to occur, particularly when people already feel so glum.

And that's why I'm proposing an emergency extension of daylight saving time, whose ending a couple of weeks ago plunged a lot of folks I know into a funk they still haven't recovered from. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and one of these measures, traditionally, has been to goose our biorhythms by monkeying with the clock. We did it for two years in World War I, when daylight saving time was first brought in as an energy-conserving measure. We resumed the practice in World War II (when the government called it War Time) and made it permanent in the '70s during the Arab oil embargo. Finally, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan lengthened DST by about three weeks--just for the feel-good heck of it, apparently. And while no direct link has ever been demonstrated between an extra dose of evening sunlight and the health of the financial markets, the Dow did climb after the change. Once we spring forward into sunlit winter evenings, we may never want to fall back.

Time, or at least its formal measurement, is a human invention, so we have every right to adapt it to our moods. Indeed, why stop with expanding our afternoons at the expense of our useless early mornings, when so many of us are stuck in traffic? How about borrowing days from future leap years so as to create a whole new month? American life has grown nerve racking and hectic, and adding 30 days of paid vacation dedicated to running to the dry cleaners, deleting unsolicited e-mails and roughhousing on the carpet with the kids might just be the therapy we need. If Enron can grant itself billions in phantom revenues, why can't America award itself a phantom lunar cycle? To reduce the threat of terrorism during our relaxing sabbatical, we could even keep the month a secret from the rest of the world. If we slotted it in between March and April we'd also have more time to pay our taxes.

While we're cooking the calendar to lift our spirits, we might also finally adopt the metric system. Besides reassuring Europe that we're still civilized, this would have several emotional benefits. Because there is not an American alive who knows what temperature it really is when degrees are stated in Celsius, worries about global warming would abate. Also, our cars would consume less fuel, or seem to. SUVs that now get 14 miles per gal. would get over 20 km per gal. (Hanging on to our gallons would show the worldwide metric community that we'll do this conversion our way, thank you very much). Lastly, because a kilogram equals more than 2 lbs., we'd all lose weight--just in time for guilt-free holiday feasting. Imagine being a full-grown American, your belly loaded with Thanksgiving carbohydrates, and yet being able to tell folks, "I weigh 80."

Massaging the numbers never works for long, but it almost always works at first. And feeling better at first is what's important in this season of homegrown terrorist cells and flagging consumer confidence. In much the same way that failing businesses "raise" share prices by reverse-splitting their stocks, America could fight the winter blues by officially starting spring on Jan. 1 instead of in mid-March, when it rarely feels very springlike anyway. Waiting for the vernal equinox to usher in the season of rebirth may be fine for Druids and astronomers, but the rest of us could use a rebirth soon. Not to mention some daylight to watch the evening news by.