Change your clocks

"The cows all stay on Standard Time."

Fortunately, in today's non-agrarian age, we nowadays rarely hear that complaint about daylight savings time.  Maybe I'd hear it more if I wandered over to the east side of the Cascades.

But twice a year, I do read continual griping on Facebook and in comments to news stories about the apparently arduous task of changing clocks twice each year. 

Some -- those tending toward libertarianism -- feel that this is just one more governmental interference with the laws of nature.  Why should they have to change their clocks just because the government so dictates?  I suppose a few generations ago, they would have griped about the imposition of standard time within standard time zones.  Why shouldn't my "noon" be three minutes later than the noon perceived by someone a few miles to the east?

More frequently, the complaint is not about DST, but about the switch back to standard time.  Why not stay on daylight savings time all year around?  These people live at lower latitudes, I suspect.  They don't have to contemplate wintertime life in a city where dawn wouldn't break until about 8:30 a.m., especially on the usual cloudy morning. 

Me?  I'm happy changing from PDT to PST in the fall, and back to PDT in March.  I'm just a happy dude, except when I read stupid arguments.

When I was a kid, daylight savings was a perennial ballot topic, Washington being a voter initiative state.  All the time I was growing up, daylight savings time in Washington was local option.  There were a number of years when my city was on daylight savings time, and our adjoining city was on standard time.  You walked across the street, and you changed your watch (at least in theory).  In 1960, the voters finally approved Initiative 210, which mandated statewide daylight savings time from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September.  The official voters pamphlet provided the following reasons to vote "No":

1. Farming, logging and many other industries would suffer heavy financial lost under Daylight Savings. DO NOT jeopardize jobs in Washington.

2. Children do not get their proper rest under Daylight Saving Time.

3. Seattle has 13 minutes more evening daylight under STANDARD TIME than Los Angeles has on DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME. What more do we need?

4. The State of Washington, in the past five years, has had a record increase in tourists - 20% since 1955 - with Standard Time. Tourists are not interested in time, their time is their own.

5. Washington voters have twice rejected Daylight Saving Time, in 1952 and 1954, by decisive margins. Don't let "The Playboys" wreck the economy of your State . . . VOTE NO on Daylight Saving Time.

Those were "stupid arguments," but had worked for a number of years. To my relief, they finally ran out of steam in 1960.  Washington has remained happy and prosperous under daylight savings time each summer ever since.  (A Washington member of Congress did introduce a bill in 2015 to except Washington from daylight savings, but it went nowhere.)

National daylight savings time, with a couple of states excepted,* was mandated by the Uniform Time Act of 1966.  The dates for daylight savings have been changed several times, including a year in the mid-'70s when -- because of the petroleum crisis -- we stayed on daylight savings time all year around.

We may continue to tinker with those dates in the future, but nationally-mandated daylight savings time is here to stay. 

Unless, of course, Steve Bannom decides it's a crime against nature.
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*Arizona is the most interesting of the states excepted, and remains all year long on standard time (which is the same as California's daylight savings time in the summer).  The huge Navajo reservation within Arizona, however, follows the national change to daylight savings time.  And the smaller Hopi reservation, entirely enclosed by the Navajo reservation, complies with Arizona law and remains on standard time.