I can clearly remember walking down the hospital hall, preparing to see my friend’s dying grandfather, John. I had become attached to this gentle, kind man in the two years I had known him. His wife, Mary, met us in the hallway.

She explained how John’s condition was deteriorating. In her aged face I saw the depths of grief and an utter loss of control. Her soft brown eyes were misted with tears.

“The nurse was trying to dress him today and he sat up and said, ‘I’m just an old stubborn Lutheran German farmer!’ and then laid back down in bed unconscious!” she said.

As she recounted this incident, she began to laugh a hearty laugh, as did all those around her. When she looked up, she sighed and said, “It just felt so good to laugh.”

I believe that humor is immensely powerful. From laughter we attain a sense of freedom. When we really laugh hard, we feel overcome by joy. For a second, at least while in the act of laughing, worries are not at the forefront of our consciousness. And sometimes that second of relief is like a tiny space where we can be free. And that sacred space rejuvenates us enough to find the strength to pick up our burdens and continue onward.

The reason I write humorous anecdotes is to try to offer people that laugh-out-loud experience. If I give even one person a moment of joy, then my writing, editing and obsessing is all worth it.

I try to display real-life situations that stress personal imperfections or missteps. So much of the time we compare ourselves to others. We feel that we aren’t as polished, or intelligent, or talented, or beautiful as the person next to us. We fail to acknowledge our common humanity. Our failures, strengths and flooded toilets make us human.

If we learn to love ourselves and others despite our imperfections, we create a far more accepting, healthy mindset. We learn to embrace our messes and see that everyone else has the same dirty dishes in the sink.

When we react to adverse situations with anger or frustration, we allow negativity to overcome us. Sometimes we take our anger out on other people, damaging our relationships. We develop a sense of hopelessness. If we can laugh about at least some of the negative situations we face, we render them powerless, or weaken the blow.

I’m not suggesting that every problem in life can be laughed away. This is clearly not the case. But laughter can frequently soften pain.

When my father spoke at his college roommate’s funeral, he told an anecdote about “Krekler” that is one of my favorites. Krekler, not unlike many UC Davis students, was struggling to balance engineering coursework, school and friends. One day he came into class exhausted and fell asleep at his desk. He didn’t just fall asleep, though — he fell out of the desk and landed sprawled out on the floor in front of an entire lecture hall.

My father told this story, and a wave of laughter swept through the people attending the funeral. For a brief second, they all shared happiness. They had a communal realization that life is short. A precious memory that makes you laugh has immense power to turn sadness into an appreciation for life’s little moments. In the end, the littlest things always seem to be the biggest.

I often think of one of my favorite Bible passages about an amazing woman, that says, “She is clothed with strength and dignity and she laughs without fear for the future,” Proverbs 31:25. I love that laughter is a form of strength. It’s not just fun — it’s encouraged. It gives us the mindset to continue forward with hope.

Although stories about an overflowing toilet, or whacking a fellow bus passenger might not be earth-shattering, or written with perfect rhetoric, I hope that for some person out there these stories have given a tiny moment of freedom. I hope to deliver a little taste of happiness that helps that person continue forward through the good and bad parts of everyday life.

For more from MARCI MONTANARI, e-mail mcmontanari@ucdavis.edu, follow @MarciLaughs on Twitter, or see marcimontanari.wordpress.com.

Money has always played a role in politics, but the abuse of money has been exacerbated with the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission, which [opened] the floodgates for massive spending on electoral campaigns with effects that have already skewed the political process.

Take, for example, the recent House race in South Carolina. Republican candidate Mark Sanford, the one who admitted to cheating on his now ex-wife Jenny, did not receive any funding from the National Republican Congressional Committee. However, he was still able to win 54 percent of the vote over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch even though the latter had $425,000 of ads from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and had led in several pre-election polls. Sanford won because money from Super PACs and other special interests poured into ads attacking Colbert Busch.

Citizens United rules that since corporations and other special interests are legally “people,” they are entitled to the same First Amendment right to free speech as individuals like you and me. It also ruled that since money is equal to speech, then these special interests have the ability to donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns via Super PACs, organizations that run advertisements for or against candidates or ballot measures but are forbidden from donating money directly to campaigns.

These Super PACs are harmful to our democracy. On one hand, this system requires politicians to be either very wealthy or well-connected to run for office. On the other hand, once elected, politicians begin to respond to their wealthy backers, not to the people that they should represent. Thus, politicians begin to pass laws and perform other actions that harm the public interest. These include obstructing efforts to curb global warming, passing higher interest rates on student loans and working against laws intended to reform election spending.

We are already beginning to see the effects of Citizens United. The eternal deadlock in Congress is a manifestation of this disastrous decision, as Congresspeople refuse to compromise on their issues — because they have been paid big money to advance causes that help the special interests. This deadlock has already resulted in the dreaded sequester, and I don’t know about you, but I hope that we don’t have to go through another one.

Today, ASUCD will debate a resolution stating its opposition to Citizens United. This is part of a nationwide campaign whose ultimate goal is a Constitutional Amendment to reverse the effects of Citizens United. If you want to reclaim democracy, if you want to tell your children that they can someday become president, if you want a Congress that actually passes laws rather than blocking them, contact your ASUCD senators and urge them to approve this resolution. The fate of our democracy depends on it.

Dial Hoang
First-year atmospheric science major

At the May 23 ASUCD Senate meeting, senators voted to eliminate the BloodSource line items from the ASUCD budget. In the past, ASUCD has designated $1,250 for BloodSource — $1,000 goes to room reservation fees that BloodSource later pays back, and $250 is used for advertising.

The chief driving force for this decision was because senators believe BloodSource discriminates against the queer community. It harkens back to the UC Davis Principles of Community, which rejects “all manifestations of discrimination, including those based on… sexual orientation.”

At $250, the divestment is essentially a symbolic gesture, which is slightly ironic given ASUCD’s previous lack of support for Ethnic and Lavender Graduations earlier this quarter.

We are all for fighting discrimination, but fighting BloodSource doesn’t seem like the most productive way to do so. Thankfully, ASUCD’s decision doesn’t actually prevent BloodSource from coming to UC Davis — but it does prevent BloodSource from looking to the Association for advertising, and it does potentially prevent students from knowing when blood drives are happening. By withdrawing support, we are hurting a local nonprofit’s efforts to save lives, and more importantly, we are hurting the people depending on BloodSource for survival.

The real problem is the FDA policy, which doesn’t accept donations from any man who has had sex with another man since 1977. It also bans donations from any woman who has had sex with one of these men in the past year. The FDA says this population is at increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and other infections.

BloodSource isn’t necessarily supportive of this policy, though the bank needs to follow it, just as every other blood bank follows it. In fact, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers — a network of blood centers that BloodSource is a member of — all called for a change in 2006, stating that the FDA’s ban is scientifically unfounded. BloodSource is not the enemy.

We agree that the FDA’s deferral policy is outdated, discriminatory and should be protested. But lobbying the FDA is a more effective route that the Association should consider, rather than discouraging students from giving blood to those in need.

A new online course evaluation tool is currently being developed for use starting next fall. UC Davis is the one of the last UC campuses to implement online course evaluations for undergraduate courses.

It is about time the University made plans to implement online evaluations, especially when nearly every other UC has done this, as well as some of the graduate programs on campus.

The current system of paper course evaluations is inefficient for a number of reasons. It is detrimental to the environment because it wastes paper. It’s also a waste of time — professors and teaching assistants are not able to see the results of the evaluations for up to six months after they are completed. This is problematic. Without feedback, professors and teaching assistants are unaware of how they can improve their teaching.

However, steps will have to be taken to encourage all students to fill out the evaluations because they will not be pressured to do it in the classroom. UC Riverside and Stanford give students incentives for completing the forms, such as making grades available to students sooner. This is one idea that UC Davis can implement to motivate students to complete the evaluations.

The program is aimed to be compatible with the new UC Davis student portal, which will combine SISweb, MyUCDavis, Smartsite and Class Search Tool. Students will be able to access it starting Fall 2013 and will use it for Winter 2014 registration. A new portal is needed to fix the issues with the current system. Having multiple sign-ons to access each website can be confusing and inefficient.

These changes are welcomed and we feel they will better serve the UC Davis community.

On Monday, like every Memorial Day, the cultural sphere was flooded with messages about thanking veterans for your freedom. Although the holiday honors fallen soldiers, social networking sites such as Facebook abounded with pictures reminding us that the military is the foundational source of our lives, liberties and freedom to buy a double-cheeseburger for only 99 cents.

The last time a veteran fought for anything close to American freedom was in the 1940s. Of course, we should remember every fallen soldier, but we should not fall victim to the deification of military service that blurs our thinking and forces us to support the military system and its horrors, confusing the system with the soldiers.

I don’t want anyone to be unclear about my message here, as this is a loaded and complicated subject. Veterans should not be treated like a problem themselves. They are not. We should not consider them categorically as wrongdoers. That would be a major mistake, one that progressive movements made in the 1970s, blaming veterans for the horrors of the U.S. War Against the People of Vietnam (I gave that war a more accurate name, as you can see). The problem that I speak of is of the system itself, not veterans. Vets are among that system’s primary victims.

That system — the military industrial complex, the capitalist war machine — profits immensely from war, and it does all that it can to instill in the population beliefs that will make them docile, ready to accept bogus reasoning that justifies horrific, anti-democratic violence primarily aimed at civilian populations.

The whole veteran worship lie is just a way to indoctrinate people into the militaristic ideology of the U.S. government. It is meant to evoke emotions in us and get us to stop thinking that the military is a machine driven by politics.

It is a way to get people to think that militarism is the source of our liberation. It is not. It is a primary source of our enslavement to a military-corporate sponsored sham of an electoral system. (The banking system is even worse in this respect — but that is another issue).

Did you hear Obama and Romney talk about how we needed to only increase that military machine, never curtail it? Could it be more obvious? Neither side can resist the influence of military corporations, their sponsors.

Sure, at some points in the past fighting was necessary to ensure freedom, but if you want to thank the people who are actually preserving all of the goods of freedom right now, you should be thanking teachers, investigative journalists, whistleblowers, peace activists and the people who spend their lives doing the massive amount of research that it takes to create an understanding of our insanely complex system, an understanding which we can use to effectively make the system work democratically.

Society is like an engine. Take out the radiator or the spark plug or whatever, and it won’t work. No one part is more necessary than another. They are all necessary — all of the economic niches, from nurses to factory workers to firemen. So, to say that military service is on some special level of necessity is wrong. Military service is like the car’s bumper. It only comes in handy when the rest of the unit faces a collision. It doesn’t actually make the car move.

The way that our military has been used is like the bumper of a bumper car, driving us into wreck after wreck, from Korea up to Iraq/Afghanistan. These only made us less safe, less free. These only made military corporations stronger, richer and more able to influence ideology and policy.

One veteran who deserves waves of accolades is Bradley Manning. That military system that you’re supposed to worship told massive lies about the nature of our wars. You can see for yourself on WikiLeaks what Manning exposed at great personal risk. It is beyond clear, given internal documentation, who the military works for and how. It works against us, only to make us more beholden to it and its fellow cronies.

You’re supposed to thank vets. But why? Because we value freedom from coercion for every human being (and we are supposed to believe, falsely, that the military is the ultimate source of that). Freedom from coercion is indeed a supreme value. If we are going to actually uphold it, we should think properly about the military as a system and veterans as victims of that system’s ideology. We should stop allowing that system to murder those veterans that you are thanking. That’s a real thanks, not some meaningless flag waving.

BRIAN MOEN thanks fellow countrymen with his actions, not empty slogans. He can be reached at bkmoen@ucdavis.edu.