LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
by Lisa Craft
Spring Forward, Fall Back… Already??
Lisa Craft is owner and publisher of Connection Magazine and The Monett Times.
A
t 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 12 we will reset our clocks to read one hour ahead. Yes, daylight saving time has once again changed our sleeping schedules and many of us will be late for church or other functions because we forgot that the change was happening. I personally do not mind daylight saving time. I enjoy it staying lighter later but I’m not real crazy about it being dark in the morning. What I would really like is for the time to stay at daylight saving time year-round. DST does have a tendency to throw off your schedule and the sleep effects tend to linger for a few days. I really honor my sleep and hold it very near and dear to my heart. I mean at my age, it is very important to get as much beauty sleep as I can! But there are benefits to DST. For me, enjoying the daylight well into the evening hours is better than only a fleeting moment of daylight before work and driving home in the dark. More light gives one more time to do what you want or need to do, which usually equals a happier you. Research has shown that robbery rates after daylight saving time fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during those light-filled evening hours that didn’t exist before the time change. It minimizes energy consumption and lowers your costs. When you enjoy more natural daylight, you use less artificial light and that makes a real impact on the overall cost of energy consumption. Driving home in the daylight versus the darkness is easier when you can see your surroundings and where you are going. Studies actually show that we could save hundreds of lives per year if we implemented daylight saving time year-round.
4 | March 2023
She can be reached at monettcommunity@ gmail.com
Now maybe you all have found all of this information quite boring. But the controversy as to if/when and why we should just keep one kind of time year-round has been ongoing for quite some time. I can remember when I was a little girl staying out late at night to play with the others in my neighborhood. Playing outside is not as common now days as it use to be, but we would ride our bikes, swim, climb trees and numerous other outdoor activities. One of the really fun things that I remember doing was catching lightning bugs and putting them in a jar to watch them light over and over again. This subject has been debated and contested over many years, for many reasons. I think you can guess what I lean towards but I am not sure that my opinion will make much difference in the grand scheme of things. But in the meantime, make sure that before you go to bed on March 11, you reset all of your clocks that do not reset automatically. Maybe one should catch some extra hours of sleep to build up for it or at least go to bed early, and let’s do our best to be positive about the change. Some won’t be happy about this, so let’s do our best to try to turn those frowns upside down.
Owner & Publisher, Connection Magazine