Shelter in Place, August 18, 2020
This morning I’m working to finish up some get-out-the-vote postcards before the mail carrier arrives. The thump of his feet on the stairs, the rattle of his keys, and the familiar clank as he opens our letter box signify one of the only predictable in-person contact we have with other humans these days, and we are dependent not just on the wave he offers through the window, but on what he brings and takes away - our medications come through the mail, financial documents, some catalogs we want and some we don’t, reimbursements from Medicare, an occasional cheery letter from a friend, and yes, voting information and, eventually, a ballot.
I’ve always considered postal service to be a given in my life, a hallmark of the civilized world that I inhabit. In my reading as a kid, I marveled that Jane Austin heroines exchanged mail with neighbors and family several times a day, delivered by horseback over muddy rural roads; and that old but welcome letters followed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family to a succession of new prairie towns as they moved ever westward. That was after Lewis and Clark and other explorers of the western United States, managed to report by mail on their journeys of discovery and after the Pony Express sprang up as an essential service upon the arrival of white settlers in California. Through every war this country has fought at home and abroad, mail service - with great effort and ingenuity - has kept American soldiers connected to their families. That includes my father, in World War II, whose illustrated missives caught the attention of the censor, and got him assigned to a safer duty drawing maps. I like to think the wartime postal service saved my father’s life. It is the reason I exist.
I grew up in an era when letters bearing nothing but a name and town would still make it to the mailbox. No zip codes then. And though people now tend to roll their eyes at what they consider post office inefficiency, I cannot think of a single time in my life when a letter went astray or important mail was damaged. I do not think for a minute that if I vote by mail my ballot will be compromised.
Yet here we are. This service (not a’ business’ I hasten to add) has been made a political football and once again I am wondering whether such a travesty signifies that the civilization we take for granted is coming to an end. I am delighted to pay taxes to subsidize the postal service, Mr. President. I buy my stamps without complaint and appreciate the speed with which my postcards travel from here to there. I trust the postal service. Just as it is. The people who - with conflicts of interest evident for all to see - have been appointed to run it? Not so much.