Is this the fabled “Dark Winter” of which Joe Biden hath warned us?
The annual clock changes are not something I look forward to either time, and have long been in opposition to. It feels like such a government mandated absurdity. We don’t merely want to control you, we want to control time itself. It reads like a line from a Dr. Strangelove scene that didn’t make the final cut. I refer to it as the 23 hour day in spring and the 25 hour day in fall. Typically, an extra hour added into a weekend would be something I’d support, but Fall Back leads to the dark winter officially kicking off. When suddenly the sunset begins creeping back towards, and even prior to, 5 PM. And as difficult as that is, it is far better than what the House of Representatives had cooked up to remedy it.
The Sunshine Protection Act would lock the entire country into permanent daylight saving time — the summer clock, all year long. “Permanent daylight savings time was repealed within a year because it didn’t work,” warned Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon as the bill moved through committee. —CBS News
This was, surprisingly, a bit surprising to me. Congress had a 50/50 shot to get this right, with a simple Google they could have found which setting to lock us into year round, and yet they still chose the wrong one. A broken clock may be right twice a day, but a broken congress never is.
If the U.S. were to adopt year round Daylight Savings time, northern states (and I don’t mean that in a Civil War sense) would face sunrises as late as 9:30 AM — places like Bismarck, ND would be hardest hit. I can assure you that a Bismarck winter is hard enough to endure without the sun coming up an hour and a half after school begins. Clearly there are also issues of safety; work commutes, school buses, roads getting plowed and salted, it would all be thrown off by the extended morning darkness. Another crucial factor is circadian rhythms being thrown off. Morning light is the master reset button for the body clock. When sunlight hits the eyes shortly after waking, it signals the brain to shut off melatonin production and start the day’s hormonal cycle — cortisol up in the morning, melatonin back at night, each roughly 24 hours apart. That first dose of daylight is how the body knows when to wake, and it sets the schedule for everything downstream. Get that light late, and the whole rhythm drifts with it.
Congress just voted 308-117 to put half the country on shift fatigue. And yes, if you wake up at 4 AM every day already, go to work when it’s dark out, and are dying to let us know, we salute your service. But it’s not viable for our entire society to operate on such a model.
Permanent daylight savings time has been tried before, in the US in 1974. Nixon signed it as an energy-saving response to the oil crisis, and clocks sprang forward that January with no plans of ever falling back. Support sat at 79 percent when it started and collapsed to 42 percent after one winter of children waiting for school buses in the dark, some carrying flashlights, and after lawmakers cited the deaths of eight Florida schoolchildren in the weeks following the change. The promised energy savings turned out to be barely measurable. By October, the experiment was dead and Ford signed the repeal. It was also tried more recently in Russia, in 2011, which, due to the country’s broad latitudinal range, endured even larger negative effects than in the US. Winter sunrises in the northern regions were delayed until after 10 AM, morning road accidents went up, and the stress and health complaints grew loud enough that Putin signed the reversal in 2014. They have since adopted Standard Time all year long.
Standard is the standard. Do we need sunlight until 10 PM in June? As spring overtakes winter, day by day the sunset pushes back enough that the winter blues are still shaken off without jolting us into the much longer days in mid-March.
It looks like this won’t become law anyway, because Sen. Tom Cotton is putting a stop to it. I’m not quite sure how this bill affects Israel, though, as that is typically the only reason I see Cotton taking any decisive action in Congress these days. Here’s the thing: the medical and sleep-science consensus is overwhelmingly on the side of permanent standard time, and Congress knows this — sleep researchers and health groups have been on record about it for years. Yet the bill that sailed through the House is the one every expert says is the wrong setting. It’s as if Congress chose the wrong time format to lock us into intentionally, knowing it would fail and returning us to the twice a year change as though that is the only alternative, when Standard Time is right there, shining down upon us like the morning sun, just waiting for us to look up and realize it.
