If everything works out in the Senate over the next few weeks, March 14, 2027 could be the beginning of something great.
I know, I know. In the thick of President Donald Trump — shudder — having to attack the Iranians, again, to win that war, again, and the threat of Trump doing existential damage to the nation by acting on his obsessed delusions with voter fraud, fretting over having to set the clocks forward and backward twice a year to accommodate Daylight Saving Time seems pretty silly.
I know, everything seems so grim right now with how Trump has unleashed chaos against your paycheck with his tariff turmoil and talks about taking over Greenland as if it were budging in line at the car wash. But imagine how sweet it would be next March 14 when you’re still revelling in the news that his own Republican Congress used the 25th Amendment to remove his sorry ass from office in September in a last-ditch effort to hold at least a few GOP seats in Congress and GOP gubernatorial jobs across the nation. And you get to cement all that relief by not losing an hour’s sleep next spring as the nation no longer has to grind ahead into Daylight Saving Time.
Or think how rewarding the day will be on the heels of the new Democratic supermajority in the House and Senate, elected in a November landslide push against Trump’s historic lunacy, corruption, incompetence and profiteering, and you don’t have to ruin a month or better by losing an hour’s sleep for Daylight Saving Time on the eve of his historic impeachment and conviction.
All this excitement and optimism has been made possible by the recent bipartisan agreement in the House to finally “Ditch the Switch” twice a year and go to Daylight Saving Time year-round.
The House passed a bill last week that would make daylight saving time permanent. Proponents included Trump. The vote was 308-117.
Yes!
Four years ago, the Senate passed a similar bill.
Yes!
In 2022, Colorado state lawmakers passed a bill making Daylight Saving Time permanent, but it can’t take effect until surrounding states agree. It’s contingent on Utah and Wyoming to make the leap to sensibility. Dark and crickets there.
Who cares now?
A paltry 12% of Americans favor the current system of daylight saving time, according to a recent poll.
In the giant encyclopedia of incredibly stupid things humans have inflicted on themselves and the planet, which boasts such notable feats as Congressperson Lauren Boebert and cappuccino-flavored potato chips, daylight saving time rises to the top of the list of heinous gaffes.
The story of time is marginally interesting. The story of saving it, not so much.
This gets a little nerdy here, but the gist is that ancient Egyptians had a thing for keeping track of time and the number “12.”
Way-old timers identified 12 stars moving across the sky after sunset that marked the night. After several hundred years of refinement, voila, the 24-hour day was created.
It wasn’t fancy, but it helped people know when to meet to watch mastodon demolition derbies.
Within a few hundred years, we were all winding watches to let us know when to get to the bank to cover last night’s hot check before it got there.
Then came electric light, full-time jobs and The Great War. Germans invented the game of moving the clocks ahead in an effort to conserve energy needed to generate electricity.
Of course, Americans had to do the same thing.
After the Great War, when the Germans went back to pouting and inventing other stuff, we all forgot about daylight saving time, because it was ridiculous, and we love us some electric light in this country.
Then the Germans started up again, this time inventing World War II, and we all needed more of everything and decided we could get it if we just moved the clocks ahead one hour in the spring.
A lot of things didn’t make much sense about World War II, and this was one of them. So the war ends and the Germans go back to making great trochen riesling and skis, but we don’t shake off the daylight saving time.
Rather than scrap this ridiculous notion of “saving daylight,” we institutionalize the damn thing.
We say it saves energy, which several studies show it clearly does not. We say that we keep at it to appease the farmers, which is a lie. Farmers are smart, rational people. They don’t care if you call it Work-Thirty. When the sun’s up, there’s farming to be done.
Fans say it’s for the good of the kiddies, who increasingly go to school later and later instead of at the crack of stupid, because they learn more and aren’t as cranky and obnoxious.
And so for the past 60 years, we’ve been dragging this useless boat anchor all over the calendar, saying that we’re all too vacuous or too OCD to go back to having the celestial dog wag the intervallic tail.
I would prefer that we just keep standard time year-round, because I’m old and fall asleep before the sun sets after one glass of wine at the end of July, but I support anything that ends something as dumb as a bucket of hair inflicted on all of us just because state and federal lawmakers love them some hand-wringing.
This is it, folks. This is the best chance we’ve had in my lifetime to finally beat the clock and Ditch the Switch, if Congress can just find the time.
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Daylight savings time is better for those of us in the north who don’t like it when it’s pitch black at 4PM in the winter, so I fully support this bill!
Wherever you live the sun should be overhead at noon. Unfortunately for many of us that is not the case daylight savings time or no Daylight savings time. Reasons vary most common is that 1 hour time zones cover wide ranges of longitude and often do not line up well with most state borders, when these things are decided. But there are some really stupid reasons like Ohio and Michigan wanted to be on the same time zone as New York because of business reasons. If you don’t like the time where you live you should lobby to change your state’s time zone. or lobby to make time zones mor continuous like half hour time zones. Trying to make everyone wake up in the dark because you want to get a 9 hole loop in after work is BS and this DST nonsense needs to be defeated, soundly once and for all.
I don’t care if they put me on Australia time as long as we stop changing twice a year. Whichever it is, we will grumble for a while and then get used to it. This is the way.
The best part is having late sunrise so kids go to school, wait at bus stops in the dark. What could go wrong with that?
They actually tried this in the 70s during the energy crisis and people quickly learned the downsides.
People who cry and have a life meltdown over changing their clocks, most of which are automatic now anyway, need to seek psychiatric help, maybe go on heavy doses of hard drugs to get through such a horrible experience no one should be forced to endure.
As a kid who waited in the dark for the bus despite having DST, my hatred on DST began in childhood because its awful and stupid.
Especially since teens require much more sleep, having to cut into more sleep time to accommodate the out-dated nonsense that is DST impacts circadian rhythm and brian development.
Add in the issue of children with ADHD and autism literally needing as much consistency as they can get and DST is, once again, a pox.
The true problem is having an 8+ hour school day learning things that can be learned in 4-5 hours and a curriculum based on churning out obedient factory workers rather than brilliant thinkers.
Keep DST so we can enjoy more light in the late afternoon/evening and change school starting times to one hour later.