Let me start by saying that I think changing the clocks twice a year is annoying.
The U.S. Senate unanimously approved bipartisan legislation last Tuesday that would make daylight saving time permanent, starting in 2023. But according to BuzzFeed News, the bill, titled the Sunshine Protection Act, sort of passed by accident. Since most senators weren’t even aware it was happening, they didn’t object to it, even though some might have wanted to. (If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is.)
Currently, nearly a dozen states operate on daylight saving time all year long. North Carolina has tried, unsuccessfully, to become one of them; over the years, bills to make daylight saving time permanent have passed the state House of Representatives but died in the Senate. North Carolina’s own Madison Cawthorn even introduced a similar bill in Congress last year, calling for an end to “pointless clock adjustments.”
But is this the right way — or even the right time — to be changing it?
At a press conference Thursday, a reporter asked North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper what he thought about the Senate’s passage of the Sunshine Protection Act.
“I probably would rather just go back to standard time and stay there,” Cooper said. "That’s what sleep experts say you should do. But that hasn’t been my most pressing issue this week. It was pressing when we actually leapt forward, it was pressing for about 48 hours, but I’ll let Congress deal with that.”
Cooper is right. Standard time is more closely aligned with our circadian rhythm, experts say, and permanent daylight saving time could result in a kind of “social jet lag.” That comes with a slew of potential health risks, such as mood disorders, cardiovascular disease and an increase in motor vehicle crashes.
The U.S. has tried to make daylight saving time permanent before, in the 1970s. It didn’t work. People got tired of colder, darker mornings, so we quickly switched back.
Of course, most people, understandably, hate when it gets dark at 5 p.m. It’s nice to be able to go for a walk in the evenings to decompress, or at least enjoy an hour or two of daylight after the workday ends.
But it’s not any fun to wake up to darkness, either, especially in the winter. Who doesn’t want to see blue sky when opening the blinds every morning, or sip coffee out on the porch before work?
All of these things may be true, and yet Cooper is perhaps even more right in saying that daylight saving time is hardly the most pressing issue right now. It is ironic how quickly the Senate was able to (accidentally?) vote to make daylight saving time permanent, considering how slow it is to accomplish nearly everything else.
Even House Democrats were surprised to see the Senate acting in such haste.
“I’m really thinking about dying people and I’m thinking about what’s going on in Ukraine. We just had the president here. I don’t give a damn about what people think about it,” Rep. Maxine Waters of California said Wednesday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would probably take up the issue at some point, but it’s not their priority right now.
And it shouldn’t be. Sure, it might be nice to hear that bipartisanship isn’t completely dead, but it’s not particularly heartening that one of the few things politicians can agree on is whether or not we should change our clocks twice a year.
Although it may get people talking, the debate over daylight saving time is a pretty trivial one in the grand scheme of things. There are plenty of urgent issues Congress has hardly addressed at all — voting rights, immigration, preparing for the next stage of the pandemic, just to name a few — and it would be nice if they could find the time to get some of that stuff done, too.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Paige Masten is an opinion writer for the Charlotte Observer and McClatchy’s North Carolina opinion team
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