The postal service is a dinosaur. It is a Brontosaurus sinking in a fiscal tar
pit. Like a tortoise on its back in the desert sand it has been trying to right
itself for decades. Most of the stuff it
brings to my mailbox is junk. A shredder
right next to the mailbox would be a blessing.
Just pop the majority of the day’s delivery directly into the jaws of
machine, no need to carry it up the driveway and chop it up in the shredder in
the dining room and wait for the paper collection day and bring it back down
the driveway where it ends up in the maw of the garbage truck…
Coupon books from the auto parts store, announcements for
the opening of a new Party
City or Chinese
restaurant menus-that’s the sort of stuff I would like to drop right into the new,
conveniently located shredder. I sort
through the junk to find the one or two valid pieces of communication I get
each week. Similar to the
percentage/number of actual important phone calls I get each week on our
land-line phone. The rest of the mail is
a waste of my time, as are the phone calls for time shares, carpet cleaning
services, flue cleaning services, electricity providers and scam artists from Zimbabwe and India. No, I don’t want you to service my computer
from your remote location in Sumatra and I
don’t want your penny saver publication from Crugers/Montross.
Anyway, back to the postal service.
It started as a great idea.
Ben Franklin started it and for two hundred years it held our nation
together. Letters and documents traveled
by foot, by horse, by train, wagon, and truck for all that time and people
depended on the postal service for personal communication and commerce. But, like so many other inventions it has seen
its utility pass and is now as useful as an infected appendix. No one writes letters any more (with some
exceptions, such as me) and important information is transmitted via e-mail,
text messages, Facetime and Skype. Most
school kids would not know how to put a stamp on and address an envelope, for
that matter they probably don’t even know where to buy stamps. Handwriting skills have degenerated to
uselessness and I am not sure if it is even a subject in the school system. Any communication over 160 characters would
similarly be a mystery to anyone under the age of thirty-five. So, of what use is a service whose sole
purpose is to transport and deliver written material when written material is
extinct? Answer: None!
It will not be easy to put an end to a service that is
integral to the concept of our nationhood and as ubiquitous as the Lincoln head cent. Who is strong enough to pose the proposition
that we should get rid of all the white, red and blue emblazoned delivery
trucks, the little hand carts with the canvas sacks full of envelopes, and the
letter carrier with his/her powder blue shirt and Bermuda shorts, and where in
the world did the safari hat come from? Merely
suggesting the Postal Service curtail Saturday delivery to staunch the fiscal
bloodletting caused an outcry in congress and the population. And I will admit I am torn as well by the
thought that there will be no more government delivered mail coming to my house
but, I also miss the rotary dial telephone, three speed on the column, and free
TV but nothing is forever.
It is time to recognize the direction of our
civilization. That is, we require world
class, fast and affordable internet-universally available to everyone and
regulated in the same manner that any vital utility is regulated-not subject to
the greed and whim of money- grubbing conglomerates (read “Time
Warner/Comcast/Verizon). We do not need
government bureaucracy delivering shoes from Amazon-there are plenty of private
companies who do this very well already!
We do need educational systems which include art, physical education,
nutrition and health education as well as the traditional three R’s. Why do I bring this up while discussing the
postal system? Because the postal system
of the United States
is only part of the joke shared by the rest of the world. We are becoming a nation of test takers,
wasters and fall-behinders! We squander
our resources on old technology when we support the P.O. and ignore the health
and education of our population. We
support the P.O. and accept our faulty digital infrastructure (or worse, leave
it to the back-room antics of the monopolies and politicians who keep it slow
and make it expensive). We ignore the
bridges and roads we need to maintain our society but build drones and billion
dollar planes and trillion dollar armies.
We have an obligation to ourselves to have the best educational system,
medical delivery system, healthy people and clean water and…Oh, my God! There are so many things that are more
important than propping up the United States Postal Service! Just let it go.
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