One advantage of living in Arizona for 15 years was not having to    monkey around with clocks and watches twice a year because of the Daylight Savings foolishness.

          Sure, if I were a modern human, I could just bark, “Alexa. What time is it?” Or look at an iPhone, which not only would tell me the time, but the recipe for Chicken Kiev or the route from Denver to Arvada.

          Unfortunately, I’m an old-fashioned guy, not only sans an iPhone but also averse to speaking with a robot who can tell me what time it is and how much snow Todd, the handyman for our senior living place, has to shovel this morning.

          We invited a grandkid to visit for cookies and hot chocolate on the second Sunday of March here in Colorado and then “suggested” that he help us reset some eleven clocks in the place, most of which are digital, and might as well have been in Mandarin to the old-timers.

          The national battle over whether the House of Representatives should go along with the Senate and make Daylight Savings permanent isn’t quite as momentous as the one over tinkering around with the election system, but it does get a lot of interest groups’ dander up. Educators don’t want kids trekking off to school in the dark.  Farmers complain they can’t ever convince their cows to reset bovine time pieces.  The winter sports industry here in Colorado—a multi-billion dollar phenomenon—doesn’t want skiers forced off the slopes an hour early.

          There are a heckuva lot of oars in the pond.  Only Hawaii and Arizona are not semi-annual clock changers, but even those folks have to remember not to call Aunt Tilly back in Hoboken when she had gone to bed at nine and you were still having your first cocktail at six.

          Of course, politicians can’t change how the planet spins or how close Omaha is to the North Pole. We were in Edmonton, Alberta—a thousand miles north and a thousand miles west of Omaha--and asked a local what it is like in the dead of winter.  She said, “You don’t want to be here. Kids leave for school in pitch dark and they come home just after three in pitch dark.”

          Some politicians worried about schools starting or stopping in the dark here in the Central Time zone have suggested that schools don’t have to be slaves to clock or calendar.  They can just announce that classes will begin say, in April, at 10 a.m.  Naturally, working families would shout, “Who’s going to watch Hilda and Eddie when we’ve left for our jobs at seven?”

          That sounds a lot like the worries expressed during Covid when schools were shut and parents still physically had to go to the office.

          My guess is that the House won’t go along with the Senate and end the clock-meddling, And politicians would rather have you worrying whether you have changed your clocks twice a year than whether the world is going to blow up at the hands of a mad man like Putin.

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