Whenever We’ll Stop Changing the Clock, I Hope We’ll Stay at the Summer Time…
If last year it was pretty much the only reason why I went to bed at all before the marathon, the clock going back is proving quite useful for me for the second year in a row, this time because it provides me both the topic for this week’s second post and the time to write it, rushed as it is, while also still letting me get ready for the morning, since I mean to get up pretty early and hope to manage to leave before noon. But that doesn’t mean that the practice doesn’t still need to go away, though I hope that when it finally will go away, the decision will be to stay on the summer time and not follow in the footsteps of Mexico and stay on the winter time, even though this is actually the standard one, since winter time means that sunset comes too early when the days are short and that sunrise would come too early when they’re long.
Of course, the European Parliament already voted to end the practice, the vote taking place in 2019 and the decision being supposed to come into effect in 2021, but it was left to each country to decide whether they’ll stay on the summer or the winter time, and countries also had to agree on how to coordinate the change, which never happened. In fact, with crisis after crisis hitting since then, the matter wasn’t even brought up again since 2019, and there seem to be no plans to do so in the foreseeable future… Which also seems to be the case in the United States, even though the Senate approved the proposal in March, so at a time when all of the current crises were already being felt, and that proposal actually did refer to sticking to the summer time, though it was apparently left to the House to actually decide which to pick, and that’s yet to happen because the matter was set aside there as well.
Sure, while things should be simpler after such a decision, it will create quite a mess if not implemented all over the world at once, so it requires planning and negotiations and it’s not hard to agree that there are much more important matters to deal with at the moment. But maybe someday the decision makers will get around to sorting this matter out as well. And, as I said, when that time will come, I certainly hope that they’ll decide to stick to the summer time, at least in this part of the world.
