When I was in college, I didn’t like waking up in the morning. I would hit snooze, then shut off my alarm and sleep through a class or two before sunlight made it impossible to sleep and I would roll out of bed and race over for a last-minute serving of Cap’n Crunch before the dining hall closed. I was kind of a loser.
Then I grew up. I adapted to jobs with greater demands on punctuality, got married and eventually had children. As a responsible adult and fully formed participant in society, I’ve come to value the morning daylight that used to annoy me in college. I wake up early every day now and take at least one kid to school, camp or daycare before starting work.
I leave my house in the daylight almost every day, even in the darkest stretch of winter. That’s because we have a brilliant system in which we change our clocks twice a year to optimize sunlight around the rituals of American life. Our forefathers didn’t get everything right, but springing forward and falling back are gifts of inerrant wisdom.
That’s why it’s annoying that Congress is pandering to whiners who want to blow up perfection and create a new system that most people would hate.
Congress hits snooze on history
The House on July 14 passed legislation to make daylight saving time permanent. That means the daylight orientation we’re experiencing now, with later sunrises and later sunsets, would continue through fall, winter and forevermore with no one-hour clock resets. President Donald Trump supports it and there’s a nonzero chance the Senate passes it.
This is so incredibly stupid.
The modern case for permanent daylight saving time is that many people hate changing their clocks, prefer evening sunlight for recreation and worry that the current system worsens health problems, from heart attacks after the spring time change to seasonal depression during dark winter months.
Look, I’m a #trustscience kind of guy. But when it comes to the oft-cited research suggesting clock changes cause heart attacks, I’m going to have to do my own research.
And, by research, I mean I have strong anecdotal evidence that many people wake up at different times on different days throughout the year without having heart attacks. For example, some days are workdays and some days are weekends. Some days work starts at 8 and some days work starts at 9:30. These varying time considerations apply across demographics and economic classes.
Sure enough, if you Google hard enough, you will find more science challenging the link between clock changes and heart attacks. Because obviously! Who are these people so structured and fragile that they are dying from springing forward?
They don’t show up beyond data points in contested observational studies. But do you know what has actually been documented? Deaths tied to the last national experiment with permanent daylight saving time.
America already tried this. We hated it.
That’s right, the reason I can so confidently call permanent daylight saving time stupid is because we’ve tried it before and it failed.
President Richard Nixon signed permanent daylight saving time into law in December 1973. Florida immediately saw a spike in schoolchildren dying during early-morning crashes and schools started calling for a reversal.
Soon enough, the rest of America came around.
Permanent daylight saving time began with 79% approval, according to The New York Times, but dropped to 42% by February 1974 as Americans slogged through a winter of dark mornings. Ten months after Congress overwhelmingly passed permanent daylight saving time, the same Congress overwhelmingly voted to repeal it.
And here we are again!
Yes, later sunsets are nice and, yes, it is annoying to change clocks twice a year. No one will argue those points. The issue here is that it’s objectively worse to live through sunrises after 9 a.m., as we would experience here in Indianapolis during the depths of winter. That’s not just, like, my opinion man. It is the revealed preference of Americans as demonstrated in the 1974 repeal of permanent daylight saving time.
If we had real leaders in Congress, they’d be reminding Americans that they don’t actually want the thing they say they want. Instead, the same people who pander over term limits are pretending it’s a great idea for everyone to go to school and work in the dark — or, better yet, maybe not even wake up at all. Who needs mornings, anyway?
That’s a concept my loser college self would have loved. These days, though, I’d prefer to see Congress act in the best interests of responsible adults.
Contact James Briggs at 317-444-4732 or james.briggs@indystar.com. Follow him on X at @JamesEBriggs.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Permanent daylight saving time is a loser college kid’s dream | Opinion
Reporting by James Briggs, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By James Briggs, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
