I have thus far resisted the temptation to opine on the issue of moving to permanent daylight saving time and thereby ending the practice of changing the clocks twice a year. But now that the United States House of Representatives has voted to make daylight saving time permanent, I feel that the time has come to take a bold stand.

The choices seem to be either moving to permanent daylight saving time or keeping standard time year-round.

I am firmly in the “do nothing” camp.

I can understand wanting to avoid the grueling task of changing the clocks twice a year. That’s five minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.

There is also a human tendency to believe that the world became more enlightened on the day we were born and that anyone who lived before us was an ignorant troglodyte.

But there were sound and practical reasons why previous generations thought that changing the clocks twice a year made good sense. These reasons will inevitably dawn on the anti-time-change crowd once they experience them for themselves.

We know this because moving to permanent daylight saving time has already been tried – and it failed miserably.

Year-round daylight saving time was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, seeking to maximize evening sunlight on the theory that it would help mitigate the ongoing national gas crisis. But while the experiment initially proved popular, approval quickly plummeted, dropping below 50 percent just months later.

As it turned out, parents disliked sending their kids to school in the dark, and a majority of the public expressed distaste for starting their winter workday when it’s still night.

It almost seems like people back then didn’t think through the implications ahead of time. Sound familiar?

Advocates of moving to permanent daylight saving time think it would be lovely in the winter if it got dark at 5 p.m. instead of 4 p.m. But how will they feel in December and January when they’re commuting to work with their headlights on at 8 a.m.?

And how will supporters of permanent standard time like it when their long summer evenings of outdoor activity until 8:45 are cut short by dusk at 7:30? And who wants to wake up to daylight pouring through the windows at 3:30 a.m.? If I wanted to live like an Alaskan, I’d move to Anchorage.

There is one big reason to hope that the current plan to move to permanent daylight saving time will once again be dead in the water: President Trump supports it.

That alone ought to generate enough knee-jerk opposition to derail this proposal until at least January of 2029.
—
[This column originally appeared in the July 16, 2026 Wakefield Daily Item.]