A Daylight Savings Time rant

It's time to make it permanent!

(This is a clock)

We do plenty of dumb stuff as a society.

Among the dumbest will come early this Sunday morning when we move our clocks ahead an hour — turning 2 am to 3 am.

In doing so, we will begin 8 months of daylight savings time — in which we get an extra hour of light every night.

Every. Damn. Night.

Which raises an obvious question: Why don’t we just make daylight savings time permanent in the United States? Doing so would:

1. Give us an extra hour of daylight every night

2. Free us from the dumb-assery of changing our clocks, for no good reason, twice a year

3. Reduce the number of car accidents on the roads — as it is lighter when people are commuting home

4. Reduce violent crimes

5. Conserve energy

6. Increase spending

7. Give us an extra hour of daylight every night (It’s important enough to mention twice)

Congress has actually tried to do something about this. In March 2022, the Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed legislation that would have made daylight savings time permanent.

“You’ll see it’s an eclectic collection of members of the United States Senate in favor of what we’ve just done here in the Senate, and that’s to pass a bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said at the time. “Just this past weekend, we all went through that biannual ritual of changing the clock back and forth and the disruption that comes with it. And one has to ask themselves after a while why do we keep doing it?”

Despite the Senate’s vote, the House never acted on the bill. Rubio has introduced the legislation again in the Senate this year while Florida’s Vern Buchanan is leading the charge in the House.

(Florida LOVES permanent daylight savings time!)

What monsters oppose this change?

The crowd who says that it stays too dark for too long in the morning, mostly. The early exercise crowd.

Let’s be honest: These people are the worst. They are the ones who run in the morning while us normals are groggily just trying to get the kids to not miss the bus. The ones who talk about their stride length and swap articles from Runner’s World.

The ones who stroll into the office at 8 — proudly announcing “I’ve already done my workout for the day!” while drinking a green juice.

You know who they are. Hell, you may be one of them. To which I say: Workout at night! It will be light for another whole hour!

There’s also a traditionalist crowd who makes the case that because we’ve been changing the clocks twice a year we should just keep on doing it.

But, a quick look at the history of daylight savings time shows that we have been changing the rules around it a whole heck of a lot!

We didn’t even have daylight savings time until 1966 when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act. And, prior to 2007, DST began in April and ended in October. But, President George W. Bush — in hopes of addressing the country’s long-term energy issues —made Daylight Saving Time start three weeks earlier and end a week later.

(Sidebar: The whole reason we have daylight savings time is not, as is commonly assumed, because we wanted to give farmers more time to work in the fields in the spring and summer. Instead, it’s aimed at reducing our electricity consumption by making it light later in the day.)

Plus, there’s already a movement in the states to make daylight savings time permanent. Nineteen states have passed legislation that would put them on permanent daylight savings time if Congress allowed such changes, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

And then there’s the sleep industry aka Big Sleep (not kidding this is a thing) that isn’t much of a fan of more light at night.

“Since the events in Congress last spring around daylight saving time, we have met with the offices of dozens of legislators to discuss restoring permanent standard time, with most of them being open and interested in the issue,” Melissa Clark of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine wrote in an email to the Washington Post.

(The sleep industry insists that daylight savings time messes with our circadian rhythms and is, therefore bad. I’ll take my chances.)

Look. I am not always right. (See “Election, 2016.”). But I am absolutely 100% right about this. This should be the last year we spring ahead. Let’s just stay ahead. Winter is bad enough. We don’t need MORE darkness.

The comments section awaits…