Dylon Harrison
Interim Editor-in-Chief
This past Sunday, Mar. 8, Daylight Savings Time began. Because of this, all clocks are set ahead one hour and won’t go back until Nov. 1.
For me, this lost hour is a big deal. Whenever we jump forward an hour, I feel jetlagged for at least a week, without having ever left town.
Not to mention, as students our time is extremely valuable. We can’t afford to lose an hour of our day, even if it is in the middle of the night.
Many of us choose not to set alarm clocks for Sunday mornings, as it is one of the few days of the week that we don’t have to be up at a certain time, but we still tend to wake up around the same time each Sunday.
This hour shift passes while we sleep and leads to us losing time for productivity when we wake up.
Some states have done away with Daylight Savings Time. I think it’s time for Idaho to do the same.
The whole point of Daylight Savings time is to give us an extra hour of sunlight in the evening during the summer. However, this hardly seems worth it.
When Daylight Savings was initially introduced on a global scale, this practice made more sense. The extra hour in the evening allowed troops to burn less fuel for artificial light during WWI.
Now we have electricity. We don’t need to burn fuel to have artificial light, so we don’t really need to have that extra hour of evening light.
We have a lot of daylight in the summer months. I understand the desire to use as much of it as possible, but it doesn’t seem like that hour is valuable enough to change the time of day in certain places, changing their relationship to others.
It would make more sense to stay in Standard Time all year. This would decrease confusion among the general public, and remove the pointless hassle of having to change our clocks twice a year for no real reason.
Daylight Savings Time is a relic of the past, and it has lost its usefulness in 2020. We would be better off getting rid of it entirely.
Unfortunately, it is not likely to go away anytime soon. Each state gets to decide on its own if they want to abide by Daylight Savings Time, so in order to get rid of it, each state’s legislature would have to vote to do so.
That is also just for America. Currently, 70 countries around the world have some form of Daylight Savings, all of which start and end on different dates at different times.
Maybe someday we will see the end of this old and obsolete tradition, but it seems like we’ll all be losing more and more hours from our days for years to come before that will happen.
