“58/365 – Enjoying daylight savings” by B.Positive.2014 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

By Violeta Rocha
Staff Reporter

Give us our sunshine back! With daylight saving time–NOT daylight savings time–it might be so easy at first to have that extra hour of sleep, but then the first day seems eternal, the anxiety kicks in, and you are just waiting for the day to be over. In March, when we spring it forward, we lose an hour of sleep and wake up sleep-deprived. Spring forward and fall back, well, we sure do know this routine with our eyes closed.

Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii are the only states that don’t observe daylight saving time. So why are we still observing daylight saving time when other states have chosen to end it? 

Last year, 60 percent of California voters approved Proposition 7 to end Daylight Saving Time. So, why didn’t it go into effect at the beginning of the year? Well, you can blame it on Congress.

In order for the bill to move forward, it would require two-thirds of both the Senate and Assembly to end daylight saving time for good. Congress has failed to make daylight savings permanent.

According to an article by ABC, Democratic Rep. Kansen Chu of San Jose said he approved to get rid of having to change the clocks twice a year.

Chu has been an advocate to end daylight-saving time because it has increased car accidents and heart attacks when we spring forward and lose an hour of sleep. Is daylight saving the reason why our health has deteriorated?

According to an article in the Washington Post, Dr. Phyllis Zee, a sleep researcher at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago said, “Time changes mess with sleep schedules, a potential problem when so many people are already sleep-deprived.”

 So, where did this daylight savings idea even come from?

Should we blame Benjamin Franklin for proposing daylight saving time in 1784, which he wrote in his satirical essay, journal de Paris, that it was meant to save candle wax? Then, it was enacted in the United States during World War as a way to conserve fuel. In 1966, it was implemented where twice a year, we change it to standard time for six months and DTS for another six months. This established a system of the ordinance within each time zone.

So, will we ever get our sunshine back? It looks like we might get it back since there are currently four bills ready to be taken in action, and Congress has until Dec. 2020 to push forward with the laws.