Lori Falce: Time to fall back, but let's move forward

We get the reminders around this time every year: Don’t forget to turn your clocks back.

They come, of course, because Sunday is the end of daylight saving time, that effort to trick ourselves into having longer functional days. Benjamin Franklin first proposed it in 1784 as a way to conserve candles. More daylight means less darkness equals fewer candles needed over the summer, saving them for the winter when they were necessary.

Old Ben might get the credit, but my mother has been working on a similar system for years, setting all her clocks ahead five to 15 minutes so she isn’t late for anything. The problem with my mother’s system is that you know you are being tricked. I ignore my mother’s clocks and just use my phone.

One could say the same of the nostalgia people sometimes have for a time in the past when things were better. The sighing “remember when” feeling makes people hunger for that period when there was no inflation, there were no wars, there was no political upheaval. We want to go back to a time when everyone had a good job, when everyone could pay the bills and no one had to deal with things like immigration, addiction or abuse.

The problem is that is a craving for a time that didn’t exist.

It’s a childlike desire because, when we remember things, we often gloss over the bad parts. It’s a human trait to not quite recall the pain after it has subsided; if we did, women wouldn’t have more than one child. We look on the bright side. We choose sunnier days over longer nights.

But, when we objectively look back, we have to acknowledge that our pasts had their own problems. The inflation and fuel crises and political corruption of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and racial tensions of the 1960s. The Cold War and the Korean War and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. The Holocaust and World War II in the 1940s. The Great Depression of the 1930s.

Our history — and every nation’s history — is a cycle of economic ups and downs, political pendulums, wrongs done to us and wrongs we have done to others. There is no single fixed point where we can point and say, “There. That is when we got it all right.”

Maybe Mom is right. Maybe the real trick is setting that clock perpetually ahead, trying to persuade ourselves not that we used to have it better but that we can always try to get it right sometime in the future.

It makes sense. We haven’t yet mastered the time machine, but we can make plans. We can schedule meetings. We can vote and dream and act — all things that have to take place as we move forward, not backward.

Don’t take my word for it. Let’s ask Franklin. In 1735, our Pennsylvania founding father said, “Look before, or you’ll find yourself behind.”

We can’t turn our clock back to a time and place that exists only in our craving for what is better than what we have. We can hope only to achieve it sometime in the future.