Looking back on why we spring forward
Crickets and cricket. If you’re stumbling in the morning darkness, fumbling with your clothing and rummaging through your nightstand and desk looking for that hour you’ve just lost after setting your clock forward an hour Sunday, blame it on the insects and the game.
Crickets and cricket. Daylight saving time 2023 is here, the “spring forward” part of the “spring forward/fall back” seasonal splitting of the year when we lose an hour.
But who springs forward on one less hour of sleep? The natural reaction that morning upon springing forward and seeing that it’s still dark outside is to fall back into bed.
The soul singer Tyrone Davis wished that he could “Turn Back the Hands of Time” to undo the mistakes by which he lost his lady. Most of us wish we could go back in time for something, whether it’s to recapture lost romances, change career plans, or take great advice which was spurned.
Daylight saving time lets us turn back the hands of time but without the rousing lifechanging benefits. DST makes no sense. It is an arbitrary, whimsical exercise in futility whose reasons for existing were based in myths and untruths.
How many of us grew up thinking that the reason for DST was to help farmers? Farmers get blamed for this, but the truth is that farmers have never been in favor of it because it disrupts their daily routine. In 1919, the agricultural industry lobbied against DST. Nowhere in the world was DST implemented to help farmers.
Others blame or credit Benjamin Franklin for conceiving DST because of a 1784 letter he wrote to “The Journal of Paris” suggesting that the Parisians could save on candles and lamp oil by changing their sleeping habits. That Franklin also proposed taxing windows with shutters, policing the burning of candles and limiting the number of candles a family could burn illustrates Franklin was being satirical.
So, who’s brainchild was DST? The culprit is the British-born New Zealand entomologist George Hudson. As someone who studied insects, such as crickets, Hudson wanted more summer sunlight for his bug hunting. In 1895, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society in which he proposed the idea of DST.
In his paper, he said that the extra time in the evening could be spent on, “cricket, gardening, cycling or any other outdoor pursuit desired.”
Initially, and deservedly so, he was mocked, but his idea caught on.
Daylight Saving Time was used by the United States during World War I and World War II, but it didn’t become a yearly time change until the Uniform Act of 1966.
Back then, DST began the last Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October. But like weeds in a garden, it has gradually extended its reach to the point of consuming two thirds of the year. The reality is that what we call Daylight Saving Time is now Standard Time.
We’d prefer for Texas to follow Arizona and Hawaii’s lead and not participate in the charade known as Daylight Saving Time. This year, as in years past, there are bills in the Texas Legislature advocating this.
The twice-yearly changing of the clock is silly, and standard time of daylight saving time should be made permanent.
Should it prevail, our suggestion to our daylight-saving friends is that nothing prevents you from getting up an hour earlier each day.
The rest of us would like our hour back. Maybe we’ll use it to search for crickets, play cricket, or teach a cricket to play cricket.
Crickets and cricket are to blame for daylight saving time