WHITBY FREE PRESS, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1981 E 7 PAGE SEVEN YA WN Over the last several weeks, I have been getting less and less sleep because 1, like my cave-man ancestors, wake up with the sun. With the sun now popping over the horizon at about 6 in the mor- ning, daylight begins around 5 and so I lose the better part of two hours sleep a night. I suspect there are thousands of others out there who, like me, get overtired and cranky at this 'time of year...and daylight saving doesn't start for another two weeks. Even then, I will be losing an hour's sleep. Eventually I get used to the sun but in the meantime-... Our system of daylight saving time has not kept up with the changes in our modern workaday world. When-people worked for 10 hours a day or had to round up the cows at dawn, 5 a.m. was an ap- propriate hour to get up, but now that we're working seven or seven and a half hours a day and the cows feed themselves at the push of a button, and instead of cooking breakfast, you drive through Mc- Donald's on the way to work, five is far to early for the sun to come up. We may not be able to slow down the sun but we can change the clocks. Before someone suggests that I should go to bed earlier, I would point out that so much of the social fabric of our modern society revolves around the evening hours - prime time television, movies, plays, concerts and meetings, all in the evening. During the last war, daylight saving was extended year-round in some areas in order to save energy - with double daylight saving during the summer months. The oil crisis of the early seventies caused a brief renewed interest in extended daylight saving for the same reason - saving energy. For me, that's a good enough reason, crisis or no crisis. But sleep is an even better one. The hours of daylight before we get up are wasted and I'm sure most would prefer them to be added to an extended evening - imagine sunset at 10 p.m. and twilight 'til after 11 - think what you could do with those extra hours. If it were up to me, I would do what was done during the war - one hour ahead all year (that hour of lost daylight on winter mornings might be missed but far less than the added daylight on summer evenings would be appreciated) and two hours ahead in the sum- mer. Save energy, save sleep and add hundreds of useful hours to the spring and summer evenings. Of course, it's not up to me - it's up to the politicians and since the need arises from gradual and evolutionary changes in our working and social environment (something our politicians seem to know little about) and the scientific movement of the celestial spheres (something they know even less about), their response has been imperceptibly slow and totally inadequate (and tiring). After many years of on-again off-again discussions (the energy crisis was 15 years ago), they are finally making some changes - they are adding three whole weeks to daylight saving - from the end of April to the beginning. Big deal! At the very least they could have made daylight savings con- sistent before and after the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year - about Dec. 21). Daylight saving currently ends on the last Sunday in October, about seven weeks before the solstice. Since the whole idea is "saving" daylight, it should begin again when the daylight hours have the same duration again, or about seven weeks after the solstice, or about mid-February. Why do we wait another two months of increasingly sleepless mornings? Our ancient ancestors all lived according to the sun. But since it was man's manifest destiny to become a lock watcher, some clever fellow invented time - firstly sundials but ultimately devices for all the times and places where the sun isn't visible. As man began to travel more, he invented time zones to standardize time keeping in different parts of the world. (The by-product of time zones is jet lag - I often wonder whether jet lag would be as great a problem if people didn't know how many hours they had lost.) Because standard time didn't bear much relation to the movement of the sun, daylight saving time was invented to make somewhat more rational use of the daylight hours. Time, after all, is only a human invention. Although we tend to let it run our lives, we need to remember that what we think of as time is merely the creation of a collection of bureaucrats and politicians who, perhaps unwittingly, manipulate our lives in this subtle and arbitrary manner. We may be a society of clock watchers, but frankly, I'd far rather watch my clock in the evening than at 5 in the morning. A Matter of pinion This space has been set aside for well-developed comments on issues of local conceçn. Articles of preferably 700 - 1000 words nay be subnitted by any concernel finli viduals whether politician or privale citizen. Send to the attention of the editor ai Box 206. Whit pv. Ont. LI N 5S1. or leave'ai the Free Press of- fice ai 1.31 Brock St. N. Pornography billsupported To the editor: Our association fully supports the intent of the Pornography Bill proposed by former Minister of Justice John Crosbie, on June 10, 1986, which expressly prohibits sexually-explicit material. We support this proposal not only because it prohibits material which is exploitive of both women and children, but also because, accor- ding to existing studies, such sexually-explicit material adver- sely affects behavior and changes attitudes toward sexuality. This is the conclusion of such U.S. authorities in the field as Dr. Ed- ward Doonerstein, department of communications, University of Houston; and Dr. Dolf Zillmann, Indiana University. Further, a Canadian study by William Marshall, professor of psychology at Queen's University who treated patients for 16 years at the Kingston sexual offenders clinic, indicates that pronography (depicting explicit but non-violent sex) is used by some sex offenders in their "ritual preparations before committing an offence." That is, his study indicates that sexually- explicit material is a factor in in- ducing crimes. Moreover, a paper in a study presented to the Canadian Psychological Association in June of this year, conducted by Dr. James Check of York University, found that Canadian teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17, are the most frequent constiners of sexually-explicit material in this country. This sexually-explicit material becomes a significant source of sex education for these youths and greatly contributes to their ~attitudes towards sexuality. The longterm ramifications to society of this are of deep concern. It is noted that.complaints again- st Mr. Crosbie's Bill have been made mainly by so-called "opinion markers" such as editorial boards, newspapers, civil libertarians and feminists, including the Federal Advisory Council on the Status of Women. They are, however, not numerically significant. They complain that the exclusion of sexually-explicit material in the definition or pornography fails to distinguish between violent sexual behavior and normal sexual ac- tivity. Their argument, however, evades the major problem of sexually-explicit materiial - namely, that it has a harmful effect on society as outlined above, and it is for this reason that it should not be readily available. Our association, therefore, recommends that the definition of pornography, which includes the prohibition of sexually-explicit material as set out in the Crosbie* Bill, be retained in the new Por- nography Bill, which is to be brought forward during this session of Parliament. Susan Shetler Marj Kelsey Co-founders People Against Pornography; To the editor: Sad to say that Dr. Frankenstein is alive and well on planet earth today. The Vatican recently issued a policy document attacking, ar- tificial insemination, invetrofer- tilization, sperm and embryo banks, human cloning and human- animal hybrids. I think it should be mandatory reading for this technocratic world of ours, especially for our up and coming genetic engineers. I dop't know where these people get thé idea in their heads they can play God with human lives. There is a callousness when it comes to human life in the medical and other sciences. The world has become a gigantic laboratory and the tiniest humans its guinea pigs. I find it deeply distressing when an animal's right to life (i.e. animal rights activist) is more vehemently upheld than a human being's right to life. If you haven't heard about the report, it talks about couples who can't have children naturally, so give sperm and ovum to be fer- tilized in a test tube. Although one baby is produced from this, there are, many test tube babies that are either destroyed or even ex- perimented on. It was stated on a recent talk show that there are probably labs now involved in experimentation in human cloning, human sperm fer- tilizing animal ovum and vice ver- sa. Just like the way we justify abor- tion ("We are helping women"), so we justify human genetics as "We are helping couples who-don't have children." My God! Is human life so cheap that we can treat it as a lab ex- periment I'm not sure I want to live in that kind of a world. I prefer the one that says "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male'and SEE PAGE 15 We can't play God