My View From the cheap seats

Twice a year, this country goes through the same ritual. We move the clocks one hour, and half of America acts as though someone stole Christmas.

You’d think we had been asked to climb Mount Everest wearing flip-flops. My friends spend the next two weeks announcing how tired they are. My co-workers shuffle through the office looking like survivors of a transatlantic voyage. Social media fills with declarations that changing the clocks is cruel, outdated and probably responsible for everything from high blood pressure to the cancellation of their favorite television show.

All this over one hour.

Now Congress has decided to rescue us from this annual hardship. The House has passed a bill making Daylight Saving Time permanent, and President Trump says he’ll sign it if the Senate sends it to his desk.

Problem solved? I don’t think so.

I actually like Daylight Saving Time. By the time we spring forward, the days are getting longer anyway, and that extra hour of evening sunshine is one of the best parts of spring and summer. You can grill after work, take a walk or simply sit on the porch without bedtime arriving before supper.

The problem isn’t Daylight Saving Time. The problem is keeping it all year.

Around here, the sun wouldn’t rise until nearly 9 a.m. during parts of November, December and January. I’d leave home in the dark, drive to work in the dark and still be sitting at my desk before daylight finally arrived. I’ve had enough darkness by January without volunteering for more.

The funny thing is we’ve already tried this.

During the oil crisis in the 1970s, Congress put the country on year-round Daylight Saving Time in hopes of saving energy. It sounded like a great idea until people actually had to live with it. Parents didn’t like sending children to school in the dark. Commuters didn’t enjoy driving to work before sunrise. Americans complained so loudly that Congress repealed the law before a year had passed.

Apparently, we’ve forgotten that little history lesson.

Here’s what I know will happen if this bill becomes law. The same people who now spend weeks complaining about changing the clocks every March and November will become the same people complaining that it’s still dark when they leave the house in January.

Somebody will post on Facebook, “Can you believe it’s 8:45 and the sun still isn’t up?”

That’s when I’ll quietly think, “Told you so.”

Nobody in Washington has asked my opinion, which seems like something they’d do before rearranging daylight for 340 million people. Had they called, I’d have suggested leaving things exactly the way they are.

Permanent Standard Time would steal an hour of evening daylight during the summer, when we actually want to be outside. Permanent Daylight Saving Time gives us those wonderful summer evenings but replaces them with gloomy winter mornings. Neither option is perfect.

And here’s the part Congress seems to be overlooking. Americans are going to complain regardless.

We’ll complain when it gets dark too early. We’ll complain when it stays dark too late. If we stop changing the clocks altogether, we’ll simply find something new to complain about.

We’ve been changing the clocks for decades. We survive it every year. We grumble for a few days, drink an extra cup of coffee and move on with our lives.

Leave the clocks alone. They’re not the problem.

The problem is that complaining has become America’s favorite pastime, and no act of Congress is ever going to change that.