Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to change the nation’s clocks to Daylight Saving Time all year round. If it passes the U.S. Senate and is signed into law by President Donald Trump, it will be solid proof of one thing: It takes 50 years for America to forget how stupid something is.
I was a junior in high school in January 1974, the last time Congress moved the country onto year-long Daylight Saving Time. The experiment was such a disaster that it was promptly repealed the following October.
The motivation then was energy conservation. America was suffering from oil shortages under a boycott by Middle East producers. The theory was that by having more daylight in the evening throughout the winter, Americans would use less electricity to light their homes.
But an hour of extra daylight in the evening in winter also meant shoving sunrise later by an hour. Depending where you lived, that meant the sun wouldn’t shine its first light until 8 or 9 a.m. The reason I remember this so well is it was the first time I’d ever walked to school in the still pitch dark.
All over America the story was the same. Children from kindergarten to high school went out in the dark to walk to school or catch the school bus. The dangers of that became real when eight school children in Florida were killed in traffic accidents in just the first two weeks. Other children around the country were injured in collisions with cars as well.
As an example, this is what that change would mean here where I live in Lockport, in Western New York state.
In mid-December, our local sunrise would be at 8:20 in the morning. Students at Lockport High School will already be finishing first period. Students at Aaron Mossell Junior High will already be in their homerooms. Our elementary school students, children as young as five years old, will be already walking to school or standing on a corner waiting for the bus.
Thousands of children forced to stand or walk on dark winter roads covered with slippery ice. What could possibly go wrong?
This motivation for the change this time around is not energy conservation but convenience. A lot of Americans just don’t like the hassle of moving our clocks backward an hour in fall and forward an hour in spring. People complain it causes too much sleep disruption.
I find that reason hard to swallow. Every day more than three million passengers take airline flights in the U.S., most of them crossing at least one time zone and often more. Americans are happy to change their watches and lose an hour of sleep to see family, or go on vacation, or attend a work meeting. But then they are willing to force the nation’s children to walk to school in the dark because they find it annoying to change our clocks by an hour twice a year.
Some people say the solution is to keep the nation’s clocks on permanent standard time. We would dodge those dark winter mornings by giving up an hour of our long summer days. I say no to that as well. What use do we have for an extra hour of summer daylight at 5 a.m.? I prefer the summer joy of having hours of light after dinner, for children to play and for families to take a bike ride or a walk together, especially if it is to go get ice cream.
When our students head back to school in the fall we fill their backpacks with new pencils, pens and notebooks. We shouldn’t need to add flashlights and reflective sashes as well.
For more than 100 years America has lived happily with sunrise before school in the winter and sunlight into the late evening all summer. Changing that in the 1970s was whacko and Americans regretted it. It would be just as whacko to do it today.