The second Sunday in March is the worst day of the year. It is the day that, here in the US, we switch from standard time to daylight saving time. We won’t go back to standard time until November. The entire eight months is worse than it would be if we didn’t switch, but the day itself and the following week are plain miserable. It might not seem important with everything else going on in the world, but I wish with all my heart we would abolish it forever.
I wasn’t going to write about it this year. Aside from lots of complaining on social media, I’ve written about it plenty before. Here’s a story I wrote when my daughter was little. Here’s an op-ed I had published in the CT Mirror. And here’s a previous post on this site. Plus, there are tons of articles available from doctors and professors and scientists and energy experts. Pretty much everyone who takes any time to think about it realizes that daylight saving does more harm than good (if it does any good at all).
As I was fuming about this awful, 23-hour day, something struck me that I felt I had to share. For the past two-plus years, as we’ve been enduring the Covid pandemic, there have been lots of calls to “listen to the science” and “trust the science” and people proudly bragging that they “believe in science.” I find that kind of talk problematic for reasons I’ll probably write about in a future post, but the thing that struck me today is that all the people who support daylight saving time aren’t listening to the science. The pro-DST folks are basically anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. That’s pretty wild.
