Each year, when Daylight Savings time begins or ends, I'm taken back to my childhood days when I would help my parents change all the clocks around the house. Well, except for the damn VCR. If your family was like mine, the clock on the VCR never changed. You would just mentally add an hour to whatever it said for half the year, or leave it flashing 12:00am.
Luckily now very few of us own clocks that need to be changed. Some combination of witchcraft and science means our phones, cable boxes and computers just fix themselves. I guess that means my family's new tradition is spending a discombobulated Sunday morning trying to figure out if our clocks did actually update.
Anyway, if some Oklahoma lawmakers have their way, those old and new family traditions will go the way of the hour of sleep you lost on Sunday. Lawmakers are once again threatening to eliminate Daylight Savings Time in the Sooner state.
From KFOR:
One Oklahoma lawmaker has proposed a bill that would eliminate Daylight Saving Time in the Sooner State.
House Bill 1117, sponsored by Rep. Kevin West, would do away with Daylight Saving Time in Oklahoma, meaning the state would stay on central standard time throughout the entire year.
“As authorized by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, as amended, and notwithstanding any other provisions of law to the contrary by the United States government relating to adoption of daylight saving time by all of the states, the State of Oklahoma elects to reject such time and elects to continue in force the terms of subsection A of this section relating to standard time in Oklahoma,” the bill states.
Daylight Saving Time is the practice of setting clocks forward by one hour during the warmer part of the year, so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but who cares about Daylight Savings Time? Sure, we may gather on social media and collectively bitch about it getting dark too early or having to put our kids down in what feels like the middle of the damn day, but we adapt, close the curtains and move on with our lives.
But every two or so years here comes some bright, young (old) man who is going to make Oklahoma a better place with a bill that will get coverage on the news for precisely one second on a slow news day. Don’t believe me? Just using KFOR and ignoring all the other news outlets we have 2018 and 2016’s pitiful attempt at the same feat. According to the crystal ball of precedence, it will die in committee or get buried in a pork bill that is slaughtered by some other measure. There will then be a small feeble sound of discontent on the fringes of the online comment sections and we will all forget Daylight Saving Time even exists... until it's time to change the clocks again.
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