This May Be The Last Time The Government Can Tell Us to "Fall Back"
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This weekend, we’ll trade in long, warm summer nights for endless depressing winter darkness as Daylight Saving Time ends. At 2:00am on Sunday, November 6, we’ll literally turn back time as we set our clocks back one hour for reasons I still don’t completely understand.
But if Congress has its way, we may never have to do this foolishness again. In March, the Senate voted unanimously in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act, which would put an end to all of the clock-changing confusion. That means that when we spring forward in March 2023, we’ll never have to fall back again. The bill is currently stalled in the House.
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The Sunshine Protection Act was the brainchild of Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He believes that more daylight hours would bring lower crime, fewer heart attacks and car accidents along with it.
“There’s some strong science behind it that is now showing and making people aware of the harm that clock-switching has,” he said.
Before you laugh out loud, there is some evidence supporting that the freaks do indeed come out at night. A Stanford study found that shows robbery rates went down an average of 51 percent during the hour of sunset after moving to daylight saving time in the spring. Cases of reported murder decreased by 48 percent and rape by 56 percent. But we all know that there’s a whole lot more to crime than that.
Rubio’s bill does have bipartisan support, including Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“I have received calls from constituents who prefer permanent standard time, because they have safety concerns for children who have to wait too long in the dark during winter for the school bus,” she said.
While most people think daylight saving was invented by farmers to have more time to work in the fields, the truth is most farmers were against the idea when it was first introduced in 1918. During World War I, daylight saving was intended to be a way to save energy if people spent more time outside. But these days, people just look forward to getting an extra hour of sleep one Sunday in November.
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