Time Skips A Beat
February 2021
If Missouri lawmakers have their way, you’ll never get it back. The “Daylight Saving as the New Standard Time Pact” is coming to several states near you. And odds are better than ever the momentum will sweep into Missouri.
The umbrella statement of the pact explains what will trigger the change: “In the year in which at least 20 states have passed legislation entering those states into the pact, each state will switch clocks to daylight saving for the last time and daylight saving time will be eliminated.”
So far in the past year, it appears we’re nearing—or already past—that 20-state trigger threshold. If Missouri joins, we’ll agree to kill the hour. Permanently.
So here we go.
Will we adjust? Summer won’t be a problem. Missouri has been springing forward since we first moved to Daylight Saving Time on April 26, 1970. Missourians younger than 50 have known nothing but the ritual “spring forward, fall back.”
I asked my granddaughters what they thought about the permanent change. They’re ok with it. “We like playing outside later in the daylight.” But honestly, they’re more interested in the legislative proposal to make the corn dog the official food of the Missouri State Fair. And they debated one legislator’s idea to name the Gateway Arch the official state monument.
“My favorite monument is George Washington Carver,” one child protested. “It has classrooms where you can do science experiments.” I agree with her, for a multitude of reasons. But I didn’t have the heart to tell her that visitors to the Arch outnumber Carver monument visitors 100 to one, a ratio not likely to change.
I wonder what George Carver—America’s foremost recycler—would think about throwing away one whole hour, and not recycle it in October.
Alas, the only constant is change.
Like a chameleon, our culture changes to suit the seasons, natural and artificial. In a short string of generations our telephones evolved from live operators to party lines to busy signals to answering machines to selfie sticks to texting while driving.
Media has exploded from three television networks to ten thousand channels, from AM to FM to satellites, from MTV to YouTube, from the smell of fresh ink in the local morning newspaper to the personalized silos of social media. Our shopping has shifted from Norman Rockwell images of downtown to giant megamalls. Now the megamalls have become struggling monuments to the shopping trip, replaced by the homey convenience and instant gratification of online shopping, next day package delivery and porch pirates. Our fingers have migrated away from the Yellow Pages and the Sears catalog to Google and Amazon Prime.
Everything evolves over time. Now time itself will evolve.
With pain, most of us have adjusted to pandemic avoidance techniques. The food delivery industry has changed our eating habits, and kept some restaurants alive while others wither and disappear. We’ve moved from drive-in theaters to indoor air-conditioned big screens and back to drive-ins.
We survived an insurrection. So I guess we’ll adjust to permanent daylight saving time. But on that Saturday night in late October, I will miss the comforting reminder, “don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour.”
Okay, fine. Take away my precious extra hour of sleep in October. But who’s gonna remind me to change the batteries in my smoke alarm?
John kills time by writing in JohnDrakeRobinson.com.