> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.countermarch.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Evening Came, and Morning Followed - URL: https://www.countermarch.org/evening-came-and-morning-followed/ - Published: 2026-11-03T17:12:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-03T17:12:29.000Z - Description: Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. - Author: Scott P. Richert - Tags: Forward March I grew up just a mile or so inland from the shore of Lake Michigan. The western edge of the Eastern Time Zone runs roughly down the center of the great lake. That means, of course, that the eastern edge of the Central Time Zone is there, too, not too far as the crow flies from Rockford, Illinois, where we lived for nearly twenty-two years. It’s often said that time zones became necessary because of the rise of the railroad, which created a need for synchronizing time across long distances. The telegraph and, later, the telephone made that synchronization possible. As time went on, electric (and later electronic) communication, even more than cross-country transportation, made commerce a national activity, the demands of which required a coordinated measure of time across a swath of land larger than a city or county. The rise of industrial capitalism and the slow (at first) erosion of local economies dethroned the noonday sun from the place it had occupied throughout human history. Daylight Saving Time was proposed for commercial reasons as well. Shifting an hour of sunlight from before noon to after noon meant that there was more time after work to shop and to spend money on leisure activities. On the surface, that even seems like a boon for the local economy, but today both the goods that we buy and the entertainment that we consume are mostly imported into our local communities by national chains (and sold by local outposts of those chains), which means that a significant portion of the money that we spend “locally” during our artificially bright evenings winds up in the pockets of other people elsewhere. Anyone who has lived, as I have, on both the western and eastern edges of a time zone knows that the experience is very different, even before we consider Daylight Saving Time. Dawn comes later on the western edge, and in the winter it’s common to go to work before the sun is up. On the eastern edge of the Central Time Zone, where standard business hours are mostly coordinated with standard business hours in the Eastern Time Zone (which means that the workday starts and ends an hour earlier), the sun may well have gone down before you clock out. Of course, for those who live in the middle half of any time zone (rather than in the eastern or western quarter), Standard Time roughly approximates the experience of daylight and of night that most people had in the days before industrialization and the hegemony of national commerce. Throw Daylight Saving Time into the mix, though, and I have read a book with no artificial light while sitting by the lighthouse on the south pier in Grand Haven, Michigan, at 10 PM. When I was a teenager, I didn’t mind that at all. As I approach the end of my sixth decade, however, my thoughts on Daylight Saving Time — and particularly on the proposal to make it permanent in the United States, which has once again reared its ugly head — focus more on what life was like in Spring Lake, Michigan, in January 1974. The previous year, at the request of President Richard Nixon, Congress passed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973, which established a trial of year-round Daylight Saving Time, starting on January 6, 1974\. The ostensible reason wasn’t commerce *per se*, but the Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis, which would drive the average price of a gallon of leaded[\[1\]](#fn1) regular gasoline all the way up to 53.2 cents in 1974\. (Even adjusted for inflation, that price might invoke nostalgia for the good old days — in September 2026 dollars, that same gallon of gas would cost $3.64.) I started kindergarten at Holmes Elementary School in the fall of 1973, and during the first semester, as I recall, we went for half-days. By January, kindergarten ran the full day. School started at 9:00 AM, and the bell rang at 8:50 to call the children in from the playground, where those of us who walked to school gathered and greeted the students who rode the bus. In the center of the playground, towering over the monkey bars and the swings, was a light pole, with one very bright bulb — perhaps a sodium vapor lamp? In January 1974, that bulb was my lighthouse beacon. We lived on the same block as the school, and I would leave the house at 8:30 AM carrying a flashlight. My mother would stand in the window of my bedroom in the back of the house and watch the light until I entered the schoolyard. The stars were still visible in the dark sky — because on January 7, 1974, the sun rose in Spring Lake at 9:16 AM. (The sun wouldn’t rise before 9 AM until February 2.) The light on the pole in the playground cast a bright circle on the ground, toward which the light of my flashlight was drawn like a moth to a flame. Looking back, my experience and that of my schoolmates seems ridiculous, and the American people and Congress clearly agreed, because the experiment with year-round Daylight Saving Time lasted less than a year. In October 1974, Congress amended the act to return to Standard Time on October 27 and to begin Daylight Saving Time slightly earlier the following year, on February 23, 1975, after which Congress let the experiment end. It is a clear measure of the unseriousness of our current Congress that a return to permanent Daylight Saving Time is even being discussed (much less that it has passed the House of Representatives), while the same political class seems unfazed by a national debt of over $40 trillion and has failed to put an end to the Trump administration’s unjust and unconstitutional war on Iran that has incurred an estimated cost (as of October 16, 2026) of $47.1 billion and depleted our military reserves. An even greater irony, perhaps, is that the continued development of communications technology — particularly fast and cheap internet access, email, near-universal ownership of cell phones, and video conferencing — along with the rise of remote work has eroded the very reasons why industrial capitalism made time zones necessary. Time zones, of course, are not going away, but the commercial justification for Daylight Saving Time, flimsy as it always was, is almost entirely gone, as much of consumer spending has shifted from physical storefronts to online retailers. Shifting an hour of sunlight from before noon to after noon also means little for health or recreation when people will mostly spend that same hour in their homes, watching TV, doomscrolling on their phones, or pretending that tomorrow is always Christmas when you have next-day delivery from Amazon. Any argument for Daylight Saving Time that made some sense in the past[\[2\]](#fn2) has been rendered moot by the changes in our habits and culture created by technology. It’s time to quit springing forward and falling back — not by repeating the same mistake the country made in 1974, but by learning from it. --- 1. Ah, the good old days. Perhaps the lead in the paint and the gasoline is the real reason why the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act passed. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. And just to be clear, I don’t think any of them made sense in the past. [↩︎](#fnref2) ****The Countermarch** is a labor of love. If you found this essay thought-provoking or useful, [please consider supporting the site](https://www.countermarch.org/#/portal/support).