Perhaps no other part of the Constitution is mentioned more than the first amendment. Most people can name free speech, but it isn’t the only protected expression in the first amendment.

The freedom of assembly applies to another large part of American civil and political life. Citizens have the right to form and organize unions and should not be prevented from doing so.

Trade unions have a long history in the United States and in California. Their role has traditionally been to advocate for members, which means that they try to bargain with employers for better pay and working conditions.

For private sector unions, bargaining takes place between union leaders and company executives. Public sector unions bargain and negotiate with politicians. Politicians are supposed to work on behalf of their constituents, which are the taxpaying citizens that ultimately pay the salaries of public workers.

In California, this process has changed and threatens the future of the state. The natural forces that are supposed to lead to fair salaries and benefits for state workers have been thrown out of whack.

A change in the relationship between public unions and elected officials became more entrenched in the early 1990s. Politicians decided that instead of constantly fighting against union bosses over salaries and benefits they could work with them in exchange for campaign support. State workers’ benefits increased dramatically, and retirement pensions rose to come close to or even surpass their working salaries.

This may sound like a wonderful deal. After all, many of these state workers are police officers and firefighters, and most people are willing to open up their pocket book to fund the people who make sacrifices for us and protect us. Many of these workers and their families have certainly benefited from this generous list of benefits. I would have to include myself as a beneficiary, since I am the offspring of a retired public union member.

Unfortunately, the cost of this system has become dire for the state of California. Removal of the check on the power of union bosses to demand higher salaries and benefits have made these expenses increasingly difficult to meet for California citizens who are a part of the private sector. The economic downturn simply revealed how untenable this situation is.

For instance, the California city of Vallejo had to declare bankruptcy in 2008 because it could not afford to pay its public workers. By filing for bankruptcy, the city could basically revoke the benefits and pensions of many workers. Whatever promises are made to union members can evaporate in an instant if the city runs out of money. While a city or state filing for bankruptcy is very rare, it is obviously a horrible situation for both taxpayers as well as public workers.

It should be no surprise that California taxpayers become bitter toward unions and politicians. It is as if you hired an attorney to represent you in court and he worked with the prosecution to get you convicted. People begin to question just whom politicians are working for. After all, it’s not a politician that pays the salary of state workers. A raw deal for the state only hurts politicians if they can’t get re-elected. The power and financial resources of unions can help them do just that, and pulling the wool over the eyes of the electorate can make this situation stable for a while.

Simply blaming public workers for this mess is both unfair and uncalled for. There is no reason why a state worker would turn down better money or extra benefits. The problem lies with a system controlled by top-down organization that is controlled by a few powerful people, and with politicians that are either working in their favor or who are afraid of disturbing the powers that be.

Public union workers have little choice about what politicians they want to represent them, as their dues are used by the leaders to donate to whatever campaign they decide. While the argument is that this strengthens the power of unions in the political process, it also severely limits the choices of the members and can sometimes pit them up against other California citizens.

Instead of a constant process of negotiation that ends in a compromise, California voters might take drastic actions against a perceived loss of representation and unfair financial burdens. It has happened before in California and could certainly happen again.

JARRETT STEPMAN supports many state workers, especially firefighters and police officers, but is afraid that poor policies and financial constraints could damage the state of California. He can be reached at jstepman@ucdavis.edu.

There’s North Davis. Then there’s South Davis. You can tell how they see themselves by their Safeways.

North Davis has cheaper rent, the grodier Safeway and more of the homeless in its parking lot. South Davis is cleaner, more expensive, has the bigger Safeway that carries strawberry-apple juice, but in actuality has the highest crime rate in all of Davis.

The management neglected to tell me this when I moved into Sharps and Flats my sophomore year. I only found out when my housemate told me that when she lived in Sorrento a year ago, someone picked the lock to her front door while she was in the living room. She had to manually hold the door shut until the robber let go.

“I think it’s the trailer park,” Josie says to me at work. Josie lives near the back lot in Allegre. There’s been a peeping tom stalking outside her window with a camera since the summer.

It’s an easy fix to scapegoat the crime on the trailer park, but in reality, most of the people I know who steal things in South Davis are suburban college kids who learn how to pick locks on YouTube.

Josie and I trade stories as if we’re at a bar telling childhood traumas from Catholic school. I tell her about the time I drove back late from a party one night and found a guy huddled in fetal position inside someone’s open back trunk. I never got any context.

“I just close my window and make sure not to change in my room,” Josie says, as if he were just some stray cat that occasionally jumped into her balcony and knocked over her bonsai tree.

Apparently, she’s known about it for a while. Her apartment found out in the summer, when their neighbors saw a man with a camera. They thought it was a joke at first, but when they saw him the third time around, they decided to say something.

Not all of her housemates dealt with it as casually as Josie, though. Only one of her housemates has actually seen him outside the window with the camera. She chased after him with a curling iron.

I think about this on the drive home – about all the people who want to chase after me with a curling iron are people who read about themselves in my columns. In a way, I’m always looking in on people’s lives when they’re not aware. My pen is my camera.

The uneasy part of knowing someone’s watching is that when the lights are on inside, everyone can see you clearly from the outside. But all you see when you look at the window is black.

I once saw a friend at a party – though every time I walked near her, she walked away. It was two weeks after I’d written a column about her. Even when she went to the fridge to get a beer where I was talking to someone, she had her back turned to me like she was looking for her seat in a crowded music hall.

I called her the next day and asked her why she was avoiding me. I heard her cry over the phone as she told me she couldn’t see how someone she considered a friend could say such cruel things about her to all of campus.

“I know how you are,” she said. “You don’t care about what other people say about you. But I’ll never be like that.”

I tried to apologize, but she kept interrupting me. I stopped talking, but it just made her angrier. She accused me of not caring since I wasn’t saying anything to defend myself. Then I started crying so hard I couldn’t finish my sentences.

“I’m not good with words,” I said. “That’s why I write.”

I only lived in South Davis for a year, and while the neighborhood was going through an identity crisis, I was going through one of my own. I thought I wanted to go into advertising design. I was in ASUCD. My only two friends were going out, and once they broke up, I started calling my siblings weekly.

Two years later, a lot’s changed but I still don’t know who I am. I can’t talk about myself, so I write. My friends say that I never write about myself – I just write about other people. I say I’m really just writing about myself.

GEOFF MAK has enough leftover chasers from Picnic Day to supplement every meal for the next week with soda. E-mail him at gemak@ucdavis.edu if you agree with the Washington Post in disabling anonymous commenting.

Editor’s note: The following is an open letter to Chancellor Linda Katehi in response to Friday’s announcement that four ICA sports would be discontinued.

I urge you not to follow the recommendation of Athletics Director Greg Warzecka to cut the women’s rowing and men’s wrestling, swimming and indoor track teams. This is a shortsighted solution that will result in long-term problems for the athletic department and all of UC Davis.

Mr. Warzecka’s arbitrary determination to eliminate the women’s rowing team despite the fact that it is the most economical women’s sport will likely result in even more Title IX lawsuits and grievances. Honoring the scholarships, as he has stated he will do, will not save the university money in the short-term, and will result in the long-term diminution of the prestige of the school and its athletic department. The decision to cut men’s wrestling will not insulate the school from its likely defeat in the pending Title IX lawsuit by the women wrestlers.

It’s unlikely Mr. Warzecka’s attempts to make UC Davis into a leading football contender will result in any additional revenue or prestige for the school. Rather, the athletic department at UC Davis needs to get back to basics, provide services and promote the interests of all the students.

In these difficult financial times, little effort appears to have been made to explore other sources of funding, to build an effective alumni support network or to share the losses in an equitable manner.

Please do not follow this ill-considered recommendation. Allow more time to devise a solution that works for all of the UC Davis community.

Thank you,

DENISE KENDALL

Editor,

Thanks for the article by Marcos Rodriguez in last week’s Aggie on the Women’s Alpine Ski & Snowboard club’s national championship. It’s great to see sport clubs get some love.

At a time when much of the campus conversation is about changes in competitive athletics, it’s great to be reminded that there are more than 1,400 student-athletes at UC Davis who participate in Campus Recreation’s Sport Clubs program. Not only do our sport club participants demonstrate competitive excellence (watch out for our cycling and rugby clubs, for both men and women), but they also gain valuable leadership skills by raising funds, managing budgets, arranging travel, organizing their team, hiring their coaches, scheduling their matches and much more.

Thanks again for your consideration.

PAUL DORN

Assistant Director, Marketing

Department of Campus Recreation

Editor,

Picnic Day is progressively becoming more about binge drinking in public and less about the open house of UC Davis and its community that it was established to be.

I have only been here five years, but each year, I see more people passed out on lawns, drinking on the streets of downtown Davis, driving around drunk and cursing uncontrollably. Public intoxication and drunk driving are both illegal in Davis last time I checked – or is there a one-day amnesty of the law that I haven’t heard about?

This was the worst Picnic Day that I have witnessed so far. Community members and families who would normally spend their weekends downtown and are always welcome on campus cannot go downtown for fear of exposing their children to this poor behavior and the inherent danger.

The students should consider reining themselves in. Or the Picnic Day board should consider reining them in. Or the UC should. Or the City of Davis should. There are at least four different sets of stakeholders responsible for this, and I haven’t witnessed anyone except for the well-behaved students actually doing anything about it. And all they can do is not contribute to the disrespectable behavior.

I understand and have witnessed Picnic Day to be business as usual on campus. It’s mostly clean, with families and organizations doing what they always do and making a good thing of it. (Although I hear from friends there were bad parts of campus, too.) If we limit our good behavior to campus and let our poor behavior exist off campus, are we really doing good for the community?

I was actually going to leave Davis for Picnic Day this year because I didn’t want to be around for the mayhem. I changed my mind, stayed and here I am writing this letter. Someone needs to control this.

Sincerely,

THADDEUS HUNT

UC Davis alumnus

Picnic Day was routine for me. I woke up, took a shower, mixed orange juice and Southern Comfort into a mug, lit up a fat Churchill cigar and sat out on the lawn to watch friendly drunks walk by.

One guy who gave off an intensely “Woodland” vibe (he was five foot flat, wore Famous Stars and Straps and was flanked by women wearing criminal amounts of eyeliner) stopped in the middle of the road, turned to me with his neon Fay Bans and said, “BOSS.” Even though he was objectively a douchebag, I couldn’t agree more. So after finishing about half a bottle of So Co, I figured I was sober enough to show myself in public.

Fast forward nine hours and I’m high and literally glued to my friend’s couch listening to “The Final Countdown” on full blast while watching a mixed martial arts ticket on CBS. I’m not exactly sure what transpired during those nine hours, but apparently my animated body was seen offering people Reese’s Pieces behind Dutton Hall and volunteering at the info booth in front of Mondavi for two hours. Goddamn, I must have stuck out so badly amongst the aged wine snob crowd. I was the only rowdy drunk college kid in sight. How shameful.

That’s relatively benign compared to last Saturday when I woke up uncomfortably full with a searing pain in my mouth. What the fuck was that about? I found a receipt in my pocket from Domino’s. I had to do a little amateur anthropology to figure out what happened:

“TIME: 1:40 AM, DELIVERY NAME: Big Dave Karimi, AMOUNT: 26.71, TIP: 4.00, TOTAL: 30.00.”

How did I know I was drunk? I couldn’t add correctly. Apparently, the number I was looking for was $3.29. Of course, I can empathize with my drunken self. I don’t want to add shit up at 1:40 in the morning.

There is an element of surprise when you black out from drinking. For me, it’s never, “Oh, I totally made out with this ugly chick” or anything risqué like that. It’s more of a disgusting surprise – like the one time my friend J. Grumpy spent 17 dollars at Crack in the Box. And it doesn’t help that Domino’s has online delivery ordering. I literally don’t need to move. I can just sit, comatose in front of a screen and order a shit load of thin crust pizza.

All right, let’s rewind back to me tripping on the couch watching mixed martial arts. As I gracelessly pulled out of my blackout spiral and came to my senses, something flashed across the screen for a fraction of a second. There was also a back-masked, low-volume audio of what seemed to be snapping fingers and the sound of someone saying, “Ahh.”

I was absolutely flabbergasted. What could it have been? I vaguely remember seeing the McDonald’s logo buried in-between an alternating purple bar. It was the motherfucking golden arches. What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Am I living in 1984? I felt like my mind was just raped by Ronald McDonald. And in true Orwellian fashion, the announcer subsequently blurted out the following:

“Look at that punch that just flashed across the screen!”

I thought I was the Manchurian Candidate for a second there – my brain started drifting away…

Flashed. Flashed. Flashed. What Flashed? McDonald’s. McDonald’s. McDonald’s. What’s the logo? I’m lovin’ it. I’m lovin’ it. I’m lovin’ it. What the message? Love. Love. Love. Connect the dots! I LOVE MCDONALDS. I LOVE MCDONALDS. I LOVE MCDONALDS.

And that’s how a brain is programmed!

It was a double-plus-ungood experience, to say the least. I was freaking out and I was in no way craving a McDouble with fries (though, in retrospect, that would have been the proverbial cherry on top of the SoCo sundae in my belly).

I needed this shit corroborated by the Internet. I flip open my Macbook – totally haggard – and searched “McDonald’s subliminal commercial” on YouTube. Lo and behold, on one Iron Chef show, the Food Network aired a subliminal advertisement by McDonalds that was exposed by “Entertainment Tonight.” It’s not exactly the New York Times of news, but it’s still mind-boggling as shit. Apparently, they did the exact same thing – a full screen shot of the McDonald’s arches with the “I’m lovin’ it®” logo at the bottom that lasted 1/30th of a second. Wow.

Apparently, KFC did a similar mind-fuck for their “Snacker ™” line of 99-cent sandwiches. In the commercial, the Snacker™ has a picture of a dollar bill hidden amongst the green lettuce. Google that shit if you don’t believe me.

In all honesty, I think Orwell is wrong: Oppression will not be coerced upon the lowly masses. No, it will instead seduce them, much like they were in Brave New World. People think oppression will come with flags and warning sirens. Bullocks. It will come in the guise of pleasure and it will be unassuming. You’d never know it was out to skullfuck you, because you’ve been skullfucking yourself the entire time.

DAVE KARIMI wants Erin Lebe to know that he’s still the definition of haggard. If you want to know more about why DAVE is hag as fuck, send him an e-mail at dkarimi@ucdavis.edu.