Attention all citizens of the United States:

Don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour at 2:00 a.m. tomorrow, November 6, 2016. Well, that is unless you live in the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, or Arizona. Of course, if you’re part of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, you do have to set your clocks back like all the rest of us, because you’re on daylight saving time even though the rest of Arizona is not. Whew! There really is no one correct answer to the question in my picture.

From what I understand, we may actually have good ol’ Benjamin Franklin to (thank/blame???) for first coming up with the idea of daylight saving time, which he suggested while on a trip to Paris. But since there was no standard for time keeping throughout Europe, his ideas didn’t get off the ground. Then in the 1900’s, a British gentleman by the name of William Willett suggested the possibility of a time change but was laughed out of Parliament.

The U.S. didn’t actually implement a change legally until during WWI. It was very unpopular, and after the war, the time returned to normal throughout the year. Then with the onset of WWII, the Germans established daylight saving time in order to conserve energy for their war effort, and shorty thereafter, both England and the U.S. followed suit. However, there has been great disagreement among so-called experts about whether the change actually saves energy at all.

It certainly remained unpopular in the U.S. after WWII —  especially with farmers — and was again dropped and not instituted on a consistent basis until 1966. Even then some parts of the U.S. refused to comply. The places I’ve named in the first paragraph are still resistant to making the change, and the state of Indiana was in that group until 2006, with only some counties in the state making the change to DST and the rest of the counties remaining on standard time. Since 2006, the whole state changes with the rest of the country, but it is still a contested matter among the citizens of that state.

Then back in the 1970’s someone (probably one of our overpaid government problem children)  came up with the ‘bright’ idea of keeping the time change throughout the whole year. Well, that certainly was a big bummer. So the following year we went back to changing in the spring and fall.

But that wasn’t good enough, because a few years ago, some other government official with nothing else to do suggested we change the dates on which the changes occur. And, of course, we did because  — well — change is good, right? So now what we really have is one big mess. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if we’ve even confused God. He’s probably sitting up there scratching His head saying, “Now, when was it I told the sun to rise originally?????”

???