Traffic on this blog is picking up for the weekend of the change, so time for a fresh post.
This, of course, is the easy change. Getting a 49-hour weekend is awesome.
In my short piece on CNN, and in my longer piece, I wrote about the health problems associated with the time change in the spring.
I didn’t know until this weekend that there are some serious health problems associated with the time change in the fall, too. According to this (annoyingly paginated) piece from weather.com, the fall time-change is associated with “cluster” headaches, seasonal affective disorder, and more.
All this attention, and a quick look at social media, shows that people are really getting fed up with the time change.
And now we have a new ally in the fight, a state senator from Alabama. According to this story, Sen. Rusty Glover is planning on introducing a bill to put Alabama in year-round Daylight Saving Time.
He won’t succeed, however. The U.S. Government has made it clear it will not approve individual states changing time zones. Arizona and Hawaii are grandfathered in.
So, I’ll be writing to Sen. Glover as soon as I finish this post, and tell him about my plan to fix Alabama, and all the other states as well.
What is that plan?
Here are the steps:
- Gather volunteers from around the country who’d like to spend a little bit of time on this.
- Encourage students to do experiments during the spring clock-changing to show how hard the clock changing is on all of us.
- Encourage those same students, and anyone really, to go to their state legislator and urge those state level representatives and senators to pass a bill.
That bill will say that if — and only if — at least 30 other states pass a similar bill, then the state will ask the U.S. Department of Transportation to let it move to make Daylight Saving Time the new standard time for that state. When the DOT gets one application, it shoots it down, but with two thirds of the states… - Once those bills get introduced around the country, we’ll need all of us lobbying our state representatives and senators. (They don’t get lobbied much from regular people, so this will be fun for them.)
That’s the basic plan, but I do need help. If you have any interest in helping, please look at the volunteer job board that I’ve created here. We need lots of volunteers to get this thing moving forward.
I guess the question I have for you is this: You’ve been given an “extra” hour this weekend…. What do you want to do with it? How about working for an hour to get rid of all the crazy clock-changing?