Fall back … and get set for the complaints

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Get ready for it.

Americans are going to “fall back” to Standard Time overnight and many of us are going to bitch to high heaven about having to change from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time.

I want to be clear about two points.

One is that I don’t have a problem with changing back and forth. We advance the clocks an hour in the spring to commence Daylight Saving Time and then we set ’em back an hour in the fall to return to Standard Time. I hear it constantly: Oh, the time changes messes me up; it messes up the kids, too.

I cannot speak to the issues of parents with young children, since my own sons are grown; one of them has a young daughter, so he’s got to deal with her issues. As for me, I don’t have a problem with the time change.

I get why we have had Daylight Saving Time in the first place; it was to conserve energy, enjoy late-in-the-day daylight and refrain from turning on lights and consuming electrical energy. I actually like DST for that reason.

That said, if the Texas Legislature was able in 2019 to craft a change, I would have voted to keep DST on for the entire year. The Legislature sought to offer us a choice: full time DST, full-time Standard Time or keep the status quo by changing back and forth twice each year. The legislation didn’t make it out of the Legislature in time for a vote.

So, here we are. We’ll change back to Standard Time. The sun will rise in the morning a bit earlier but it will go dark earlier in the evening.

Yawn … and many of us will gripe about it. You won’t hear a word of complaint from me.