Closer (for the Moment) to Our Closest Ally? The United States went on Daylite Savings Time early this year, a week ago. It occurred to me only today, however, that if Britain (which does adjust to Daylite Savings Time) did not start DST early, the U.S. and Britain would be an hour closer for two weeks. Given that the United Kingdom (Britain) has recently replaced Canada as our closest "foreign" friend, it seems apt that we should be only 4 hours apart rather than the usual 5.
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Or did Britain go on DST at the same time as we? I don't know.
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Meanwhile, Canada, which was estranged from us for several years after Dubya took control of the White House, has become partly reconciled to us by virtue of a change in government following elections that ousted the Liberal-Left "Liberals" for what is in U.S. terms the Liberal-Center "Conservatives". (Canada in general is much further "Left" overall than the U.S. overall, so Canadian "Conservatives" would be regarded by most Americans as Moderate Liberals, and Canadian "Liberals" as members of the "Liberal-Left" — if not Socialists or even Communists.)
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Canada went on DST at the same time as the U.S., despite the inclination of Canadian nationalists that Canada do anything and everything to distinguish itself (artificially) from the U.S. The entire outside world sees Canada as being, for all practical purposes, identical to the U.S. culturally. The legalistic differences that exist by virtue of there being two different national governments in place are discounted as significant culturally by all but a tiny percentage of outside observers. Everyone else understands that those trivial differences are accidents of colonial history, and do not, in any case, amount to much.
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More consequential, but not by much, are Canadian-nationalist efforts to create distinctions to justify a pointless and actually destructive border between our two societies. Thus, tho Canadians had no fondness for the metric system, the chance to make a sharp and visible break from the United States proved irresistible, and, after years of preparation, the Canadian federal government imposed the metric system overnite on national highways. The U.S. Government, persuaded that metric was the way to go in order to integrate the U.S. economy with and make the U.S. competitive as against the rest of the world, tried to impose the metric system suddenly on one test stretch of federal highway, about 30 years ago. The resulting storm of furious rejectionism forced the Feds to back down, nearly instantly. No further attempt has been made to impose the metric system on Americans, and to this day the only measures in some departments of American supermarkets are traditional. Tho we may have two-liter bottles of soda and 1.75 liter bottles of booze, we buy butter and meat only in pounds, milk and ice cream only in quarts.
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The U.S. is a "both-and" kind of place, where we accept all kinds of measures. We have liter bottles alongside 16-ounce bottles; use fluid ounces for drinks but cubic centimeters for medicines. We have a huge panoply of measures, from BTUs for air conditioners to carats for jewels to troy ounces for gold to Kelvin for astronomical temperatures to nautical miles for distances at sea but statute miles on land! We have rid ourselves of some antique measures from our British colonial history, like rods and stones, but retain a few, like furlongs for horseracing courses. To us, our measuring 'system' is at once enormously complicated and emotionally appropriate: different kinds of things have different kinds of measures. Of course. And why not?
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It's like a slite alteration of the famous Byrds' song,* Turn! Turn! Turn!: to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a measure, turn, turn, turn.
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The United States is like every other place in some measure and unlike every other place in some measure, because we are a both-and society rather than an either-or society. We are comfortable with difference, with some people preferring one thing and others, other things. That kind of freedom, from mental confines as much as legal constraints, is unsettling to hundreds of millions, if not even several billion people. But it doesn't ruffle our own feathers at all.
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We know that everyone is different. That is the individualism in our culture at work. We know that different parts of the planet are different. People speak different languages. They live in different climates and different time zones. They have different skin colors and hair textures, different religions and languages. But at end it doesn't much matter, because they're all human, and thus all more like us than different from us.
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We can deal with different languages thru translation programs; different measures, thru conversion programs. We can even deal with different religions and ethical systems by either comparing them to the closest equivalent in our own value system or by accepting that other people's values don't have to be identical to ours, as long as they aren't inimical to ours.
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What we CANNOT abide is intolerance, an adamant and, to our mind, INSANE insistence that everyone do everything the same.
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There are perhaps 6.6 billion people on Earth. In American terms, that means there are some 6.6 billion different ways of seeing things, and not just from different perspectives on the surface of the Earth, upside-down in Australia or rightside-up in New Jersey; earlier by five hours in Newark or later by five (four?) hours in London or York, England; but also from different ways of viewing the world from our very own, individual, personal nature. Gay men see things differently from straight men, lesbians, or straight women. Geniuses see things differently from morons. Polyglots see things differently from monoglots. Islamic fundamentalists see things differently from pious Orthodox Jews, who in turn see things differently from Christian Liberals. Atheists see things differently from all religious people. And on, and on, and on.
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So how are we to "measure" anything or anyone without imposing values?
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Some people pretend that metric measures are somehow more "scientific" or "accurate" than Americans' traditional measures. That is nonsense. Each and every measuring system is absolutely accurate within itself. It is only when one tries to convert between measures that approximations are employed and mistakes in conversion occur. 10cc is not one whit more accurate a measure of medicine than a 3rd of an ounce. Those two measures are slitely different, and I do not imply that they are exactly comparable. I'm simply saying that if a doctor says to take 1/3 of an ounce or 10cc of a given medication every two hours, neither instruction is more nor less accurate than the other. A physician will state the dosage in whatever measure is available. If the patient has only a teaspoon, and not a gradated syringe, the doctor will prescribe the dosage in terms of a spoonful (or portion of a spoonful) per unit of time. Tho "cc" may have a more scientific ring to it than "spoonful", as a practical matter the markings on a syringe may be so wide and personal perceptions so different that 10cc as actually filled by an observer could be 7cc or 12cc, and a level teaspoon could be actually level or puffed up a bit to the limit of the meniscus — that is, to the point beyond which a liquid theretofore confined to a container will spill over the edge. That may be significantly higher than the level of the top of the container (for instance, spoon) as seen from the side.
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People need to be able to function within their own terms of reference. Knowing other people's terms of reference is not nearly so important. In time terms, we in Newark need to know that it's 10pm — here. We don't necessarily need to know that it is 7pm in California, and we almost never need to know whether it is 5am or 4am in England. The fact that other places have different times showing on their clocks than we have doesn't make all those clocks wrong.
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* Wikipedia, which I do not usually cite to here since it removed the article about me that somebody (I don't know who) wrote, says that Pete Seeger, the pacifist folksinger, wrote Turn! Turn! Turn! But Seeger didn't make it famous. The Byrds did.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,216 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM