There’s a reason our clocks are switched to daylight saving time every spring and returned to standard time every fall. But apparently nobody told that to the U.S. House of Representatives, which on July 14 passed the Sunshine Protection Act. If the U.S. Senate also approves this legislation, it will make daylight saving time permanent. That means high noon will fall at 1 p.m. each day for 12 months a year. The president has indicated he will sign this bill.
With all due respect to our legislators and our president, it’s difficult to imagine a better example of stupid, moronic, imbecilic, idiotic, clueless, misanthropic, misguided, foolish, pointless policy. The Sunshine Protection Act. Right. Tell that to moms in winter, dropping their kids off in Minnesota when there’s ice on the road, snow flurries in the air, and it’s pitch black.
To critique this thoughtless absurdity, I’m reminded of the actor in the movie Margin Call, playing the role of the head of an investment bank in crisis, who, when arriving on the scene, asks his analyst to explain the problem, saying, “Maybe you could tell me what you think is going on here . . . and please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever.”
Apparently it will take that level of simplicity to cut through whatever rationalizations induced the U.S. House of Representatives to approve this preposterous bill by a veto-proof 308–117 vote.
If you’re going to tamper with time in order to account for long days in the summer and short days in the winter, you have two choices.
First, you may remain on standard time year-round, which would mean that on the longest day of the year in the third week of June, the sun will rise around 4 a.m. throughout the northern parts of the U.S. (e.g., sunrise at 4:14 a.m. in Chicago), and, after work, from mid-spring through mid-fall, outdoor activities will have one hour less to enjoy daylight.
The second option, which 308 members of Congress apparently support, is to enforce daylight saving time year-round. This means that for the vast majority of Americans, those ubiquitous lines of SUVs discharging elementary school kids in December will be doing so an hour before the sun comes up (e.g., sunrise at 8:18 a.m. in Chicago).
Or you can stick with the messy, practical expediency of “spring forward, fall back.”
One justification to make daylight saving time year-round is to claim that it will save energy. But that argument was used in 1974 during the 1973–74 oil embargo. It lasted less than a year before apoplectic moms demanded the right to send their children to school in daylight, and the data on energy savings was ambivalent.
Then there’s the health angle. Foes of the current system cite studies claiming that the incidence of heart attacks spikes on those Mondays every spring when everyone has to get up an hour earlier. This statistic, like so many statistics, ignores every other imaginable consequence. Shall we estimate how many children exiting their parents’ SUVs to go to school on winter mornings are inadvertently struck by the parent driving the next SUV in line because it was so dark they couldn’t see the little squirt? Or should we calculate the greenhouse gas impact of turning exterior lights on an hour earlier each day and extrapolate that impact into additional deaths in the world from heatstroke?
You can do anything with statistics. But perhaps common sense should have a chance. Everyone who wants to change how we measure time should consider the implications of three indisputable facts.
First, America, like all civilizations, has institutions. And institutions have hours of operation. Second, human beings are physical creatures that have evolved to function best during daylight, reserving darkness for retreating into shelters and sleeping. Third, America is situated at a mid-latitude on a spherical globe, commonly referred to as a “planet,” that rotates on an axis that is tilted. This means that anyone residing within these mid-latitudes will experience more hours of daily sunlight when said axis is tilted toward the sun and fewer hours of sunlight when it is tilted away from the sun. For the truly astronomically challenged among our Sunshine Protection cohort, this variation is because our planet orbits the sun, which is a star, and which provides the illumination and warmth we typically associate with “daylight.”
Is it naive to trust that anyone, including members of Congress, will nonetheless recognize the implications of these three facts? We want to maximize opportunities for people to drive to work or school when the sun is up, even in winter. And we want to optimize the number of hours that people can work or recreate after work or school in the summer.
Conversely, we want to minimize how often people have to drive to work or school in the dark during winter, and we want to avoid people losing an hour of daylight on summer afternoons merely so the sun can rise at 4 a.m., when the vast majority of Americans are still trying to get at least another hour of sleep.
Hence, we “spring forward,” and we “fall back.” That is how we adapt to living on a tilted planet. And it has never been easier to live with this adaptation, since those tiny objects we call “smartphones” do all of our thinking for us these days, including changing the time twice a year.
Perhaps common sense will prevail in the U.S. Senate, and our messy anachronistic system will survive another year. Meanwhile, the success so far of the Sunshine Protection Act is another prime example of a U.S. Congress that has lost its way.
Read more New York School District Introduces Robotic Humanoid Teaching Assistant
