Be sure and set your clocks back today—that is, if an hour means that little to you.
Time, it’s been remarked, ends up killing us all, and who’s to blame it? We mistreat it so. We’re impatient with it, or cruel. We wish it to be over, to be done with, and then we complain that there’s never enough of it. We curse it for standing still, and we hate it for flying by. It can’t do anything right, time can’t.
We fancy that time is our master, pushing us like slaves or keeping us in line like robots, when all time wants to do is to go with the flow.
Once a year we assault Time—not mortally, but even so—in the name of saving it, and six months later we add insult to injury by restoring the portion we robbed it of, because we no longer need it.
When do we ever give time its due—not save it but savor it? When do we love it, for what it gives us? Without time, there would be no space, no motion, no life—no us. We believe we can’t capture time, yet it’s always right there, within our grasp. It may be always passing, but it’s always renewing itself. And it’s always personal: Each of us has our own time, to do with what we will. It’s generous in that regard.
Ungrateful as we are, we wish time to do our bidding, until, worn out and heartsick with our selfishness, time bids us to do its own.
Happy Daily Savings Time.
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Congressman Paul Broun is a Republican from Georgia, a doctor, and a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Last September he made this peach of a statement at a private but recorded event:
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang theory--all that is lies from the pit of Hell…
“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
Evolution could only work, Darwin saw, given enough time. Whether one “believes” in evolution or not, can’t we all admit that 9,000 years seems an awful short span of time—sorry, Doc—in which to produce a perfect idiot?
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