Heads Up! Your clocks are WRONG!

We have never been prompt when it comes to setting the clocks — backward or forward — in our house or car.  So today, on the return to Standard Time, we begin the dreaded four-month dilemma of confusion.  Is the clock on the dining room wall correct, or is it the one by the stairwell? If you check the time on the clock in the kitchen, subtract an hour.  But the one in the basement is right now — so go by that one.  As a family of five, none of us were thinking about any of that one bright, sunny April morning many years ago.  We were heading to church — and, per usual, we knew that if we hurried, we’d be not the last — but second to the last —family to arrive.  Why is it that other families of five don’t have to dash in at the last minute and sprint to their pews just moments before the priest proceeds up the aisle? 

As we pulled up to the church — what?  Something was missing.  Those other families.  Their cars. The priest.  The sister.  Wait, where is everyone? There were no cars parked on the side or in front of our small church.  No families dashing through the front doors.  Nobody, anywhere.   After hubby walked up to try the church’s front door, he found it locked.

Hmmm.  In a state of confusion, we sat in the car, which, like all vehicles back then, had neither  WIFI nor a cell phone. After all of five minutes, we decided that we’d missed notice of a schedule change.  Church was not held that morning, we surmised. So we went home - and found out later we were WRONG, twice!  A church service WAS held that morning.  At the scheduled time, 10:30 AM Central Standard time.  An hour AFTER we first showed up.  The first time we were ever early for church! That was in the late 1980s, after the Wizard of Oz or whoever decides this stuff deemed that Daylight Saving Time would be implemented on the first, instead of the last, Sunday of April.  Today, we are supposed to move our clocks ahead on the second Sunday of March, and set them back on the first Sunday of November.  We now observe DST eight months out of the year.

But we debate it 12 months of the year.  About 43% of we the people want year-round Standard Time, 32% want permanent DST and 25% want to leave it the way it is, according to an October 2021 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. In 2019, Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill to make adherence to DST a national year-round mandate.  It passed the Senate, but not the House.  While 29 states have passed legislation to go with DST year-round if it becomes a federal law, there are a couple states—Arizona and Hawaii—that leave clocks set to Standard Time year-round. I am unclear about whether a federal effort to mandate DST will ever come to fruition. But I am with the 32 percent that support it.  I’d rather not have dark winter nights beginning in the middle of the day.  I'd rather not lose an hour of sleep in the spring because April is a lovely month and doesn't deserve chaos like that (okay, yes, it's my birthday month!) But most of all, I’d rather not have to set my clocks.  Forward.  Backward. Ever.  I wonder what it’d be like to look at a clock and actually trust it?