As we tuck into the comfort of our evening routines, a reminder from the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office punctuates the night: Daylight Saving Time is reaching its annual denouement. Don’t forget — Daylight Saving Time ends today," the Sheriff's Office posted on social media, wielding not the baton of law enforcement but the gentle reminder of time's passage. That extra hour, a small gift to our sleep accounts, is on offer tonight, they tell us.
The social media post, a mix of emojis and directives, strikes at the heart of day-to-day life. "Set your clocks back an hour tonight and enjoy an extra hour of sleep," reads the Sheriff's Office advise, a nudge as gentle as the fall dusk that, with the changing clock, now encroaches ever earlier. As our phones and smart devices will shoulder the burden of timekeeping automatically, it's the manual timepieces in our lives that require our attention, the wall clocks, the wristwatches, the blinking alarms that were not crafted in Silicon Valley but in factories whose concern was not the internet but the steady march of seconds, minutes, and hours.
On platforms that favor brevity, the hashtag #SBSO and #KeepingStBernardSafe seal the message, less a command than a community service, delivered digitally to an audience that no longer gathers at town squares but in virtual spaces. Such reminders play out on timelines, nestled between friends' photographs and advertisements for mattress sales, it's a twenty-first-century iteration of the Town Crier, one that doesn't wander the cobblestones but lives on screen, pinging us into awareness.
According to the PSA from the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office, their message is both an offering and a call to action, for as we steal back a single hour from the hungry jaws of time, we must not overlook the simple tasks that anchor us to the temporal plane, lest we find ourselves adrift, an hour ahead or behind the rest of the world.
