Congress may be about to make Daylight Savings Time the permanent time in the US, rather than shifting back and forth seasonally between Standard and DST. The seasonal shifting is annoying to many people, but the change would pit the Morning People against the Night People.

Summer isn’t the problem; it’s winter that creates the issue. Do you want you or your children to get up in the dark to go to work or school – something you may be doing already anyway if your start time is early? Or do you want the depressing experience of night falling long before the afternoon is finished? Your answer matters not only on whether you favor Night or Morning, plus how early work or school starts, but on your latitude and your east-west location in your time zone. The more north you live and the more to the east in your zone, the more extreme your winter/summer sunrise and sunset times.

I live in the north, and I live in the east of a time zone, and let’s just say I’ve never been a Morning Person. Even as a little child – and I mean aged 2 or 3 – I would balk at going to bed for the evening in what I considered the daytime. Luckily, though, because I lived in NYC, school began at 9 AM and I never had to get up for school in the dark until I started junior high.

I’d like to see school begin at 9 AM for everyone. There’s evidence that children, especially teenagers, have trouble with the early start times because they need a lot of sleep. My junior high and high school were overcrowded and we had split sessions at times, and I still remember what it felt like when school began at 7:30 AM. And no one cared that we were going to school in the dark, either.

I’m not at all sure this bill will pass the Senate, so it could all be moot.

I will now quote Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem which I loved as a child, for obvious reasons:

BED IN SUMMER

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

And now I’ve updated it for the present dilemma. I only took about ten minutes to do it, so it’s not one of my better efforts. But I couldn’t resist:

Would you prefer the winter dark
In morning to delay the lark?
Or have it be in afternoon
That you can spy the rising moon?

Because there’s no way to evade
The shortened days that winter made.
You have to choose your times, and then
In summer find long days again.

The Morning People rise with joy
In all seasons, but they annoy
We Night Folk, who would like to sleep
While birds are silent, not a peep.

But summer is the season all
Are happy with the late nightfall.
The further north that you reside
The more the daylight does abide.