Two weeks ago, you were robbed. Many of you might not have noticed it, and if you did, you might not have even recognized the robbery for what it was.

That’s not to say nobody noticed, because the Union received more than it’s fair share of irate calls from news hungry readers who were for the most part left paperless that week. However, even a large majority of our loyal readers who called about our news racks disappearing had no idea that they had been personally, financially robbed.

The thing is, making a newspaper isn’t cheap. Even though almost our entire staff, including our fearless Editor-In-Chief Matt Simon, works for free, and despite the ad space the Union sells every week to help cover our costs, printing out thousands of copies of the Union every week for the students, staff, and area locals costs money.

Where does that money come from? Some of it comes from the school, of course. However, it also comes from the students of EC. Every semester, when you pay your enrollment fees, a portion of that money is used to help fund the Union. Just like the fees you pay to keep the Health Center running smoothly guarantees you access to check ups, testing, and vaccines, you are entitled to a copy of the Union, because you’ve already paid for it!

Of course, even those of you who don’t have to pay enrollment fees, the faculty, staff, and local residents who read the Union each week, were robbed as well. You all have a basic human right, protected by our government, to be informed. You have a right to hear both sides of the ongoing argument between administrators and faculty, to know the crimes that occur on your campus, even a right to look at pictures of girls with classic cars. When those newspapers were removed, those rights were infringed upon.

Lastly, we, the staff of the Union were robbed. As mentioned earlier, working for the Union is not a paying job. Even if it was, it wouldn’t be much; Careercast.com has rated newspaper reporter as one of the worst jobs of 2014, with only the profession of “Lumberjack” being rated worse. With little pay, insane hours, and high levels of stress, it takes a certain kind of obsession to be a journalist. The root of that obsession, of course, is that after every issue, every late night spent pulling out hair and alienating friends, we know that you, our loyal readers, will get to read our paper. When that sense of accomplishment is taken away from us, we’re not left with much else.

Now, it’s most likely that this wasn’t done out of malicious intent. While the Union would have preferred to have been contacted about the news racks’ removal before hand, instead of being left to assume on that Thursday morning that somebody had stolen our racks either for scrap metal or to censor our front page story, we can understand the difficulties that the strong winds were causing that week. With all of the hard work we put in, we’re the last group of people who’d want to cause extra headaches for EC’s hard working groundskeepers.

Anyone who’s ever had to write a “state of the bathrooms at EC” article for the Union understands the horrors and tests of sanity those folks face on a daily basis while trying to clean up after 30 thousand students.

However, in the event something like this ever happens again, we’d like to remind our readers that they can always find issues of the Union indoors in both the Humanities Building and the Student Activities Center. And, if the worst should ever happen, and somebody actually did attempt to censor the Union’s content by stealing our papers, you can always find us online at eccunion.com, where you’ll find everything you would normally find in the paper (even a .PDF version of that week’s issue for those who want that newspaper feel via issuu.com), along with some extras, such as our interactive crime map and podcasts. Come wind, sleet, or snow, The Union will find a way to share the news you’re entitled to.