Negative

Yesterday my state held a referendum to decide whether or not we would practice daylight saving. We've had it for the last three years as part of a trial run, but this state has a notorious antipathy towards daylight saving, so nothing less than a mandatory statewide plebiscite was needed to decide if we'd continue with it. As I have a casual position with the Electoral Commission for elections and referendums, I was called in to man a polling place for the duration of voting.


I worked in a fashionable, upmarket inner suburb where the Yes vote outnumbered the No vote by two to one. Of course all of the polling staff were too professional to discuss either the issue or the voters while any of the latter were in the building, but once polling finished they made their opinions known.


“I noticed a couple of people voting No,” sniffed the Peugeot-driving fashionista at the next desk. “They were from the country.” She said 'country' in a tone which suggested that it rhymed with 'Home for Mongoloid Children'.


“Yes, I've noticed a lot of elderly voting No too,” said her ironically tattooed partner, as if voting No was just another symptom of advanced Alzheimer's.


Sadly they were typical of their type. Prior to the referendum, when I spoke to friends who were planning to vote No, they tended to back up their position by saying that daylight saving made the afternoons too hot and the mornings too dark. When I spoke to friends who were planning to vote Yes, they tended to back up their position by saying that people who voted No were ignorant, stupid and/or retarded. In short, they had the modern progressive mindset that belittles the person rather than the position, under the assumption that their point of view is so obviously correct that only a fool or a dastard would oppose it.


Why were people so invested in something as trivial as daylight saving? I soon learnt that this referendum wasn't really about daylight saving at all. It was about class war. Daylight saving was most supported by the young, rich and clever... basically the people who rule society. Few have the power to say “no” to them, and as such they do not take kindly to being told that they can't have what they want, whether it be daylight saving, abortion or gay marriage. The potential for the old, poor and dumb to be allowed to contradict them is very limited, which makes them all the more indignant when it does happen. They hate the possibility that the people they consider beneath their notice might have the right to tell them what they may or may not do.


I really don't mind whether we have daylight saving or not, but, for the record, I voted No. Not because I care one way or the other, but because I knew it would annoy The Flatmate, who has been loudly denouncing No voters and their position for the last three months.