It's That Time Again

It's that time again, the day when the US goes into a reshaping of society that nobody seems to understand and progressively fewer and fewer people seem to want.   It's the weekend when the collective decides everybody gets up an hour earlier and goes to bed an hour earlier until the first Sunday in November.  So that we can go to work an hour earlier, and come home an hour earlier, so that we have more sunlight after work even though we still go to bed earlier.  They call it Daylight Saving Time, but that's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  We can't affect the length of the day any more than we can affect how long the tides run.  All we can do is change what we call the hours. 

The thing is, we're supposed to be done with this in Florida.  In March of 2018, the Florida legislature passed a law halting the twice-yearly shifting of the clocks.  Unlike some other states that have plotted an exit strategy from Daylight Saving Time, Florida was going to stay on DST all year round.  Why not stay on standard time?  Apparently the tourist industry thought that shifting the time to put sunrises and sunsets at a later hour would sell better to people coming down here in mid-Winter.  That aspect was opposed by PTA groups who are concerned about it putting kids en route to school during dark winter mornings.  Still, the law was passed.

The problem is that the over-reaching Fed.gov insists that we get their approval for this, which certainly doesn't seem to be a legitimate Federal power to me (of course, IANAL).  According to one source I read on this years ago, the only power states have is to stay on standard time.  Which implies staying on DST is somehow wrong. 

As he should, Florida Senator Marco Rubio introduced the so-called Sunshine Protection Act in 2018 in an effort to work for his state and get the rest of the senate to vote to approve Florida's state law.  He got a small number of co-sponsors, fellow Florida Senator Rick Scott, and two from other states.  Nothing ever became of it.  Here we are, hostages of the US Senate's inaction three years, almost 1100 days later.  Sen. Rubio reintroduced the bill in '19, and again this year (I'm not sure about '20). 

Entrepreneur Scott Yates, who runs a website called #LockTheClock, says that in the life of his efforts, we've gone from not one state passing a bill to end the clock changes to there being 15 states this year. They're all hung up in the Senate. There's a bill in the house that might be an easy way around: US HR214 - Daylight Act allows states to decide to stay on DST, just as they now can decide to stay on Standard Time.  (I'm old enough that when I was a kid, we assumed everything was legal unless there was a law specifically forbidding it.  Those days are long gone.) 

There are two other bills; one in the house and one in the senate. US S623 - A bill to make daylight saving time permanent, and for other purposes.  and US HR69 - Sunshine Protection Act of 2021.  Both of those bills make DST the new standard time, stop the changing, but differ slightly in how they handle states that might want to keep both the old standard and new DST standard.  It's beginning to look like such a bill could pass this year or next, making the next "spring forward" into the last. 

It may seem a bit melodramatic to say the clocks are killing the people, but there are some well-documented side effects of the "jet lag" people get from the time changes: more car accidents, more accidents at work, higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, and more.