Save the mail

Regardless of your politics, here in the U.S. you’ve had postal service your whole life. The mail is so easy to take for granted that we don’t even think about it. It’s just there. Even now, when we use the internet for commerce and communication way more than we use old-fashioned mail, we’d probably notice if all of a sudden we never got any mail any more.

But guess what? The day of No More Mail could come as soon as this fall.

Can you even begin to imagine what your life would be like without mail service? Do you get any of your prescriptions by mail? Did you receive your census survey in the mail? Have some of you already voted by mail in the upcoming primary election, sparing you a potentially risky in-person visit to the polls? And although some of the greatly increased online ordering we’ve done since mid-March has been delivered by UPS and FedEx, as much or more has been hefted to our doorsteps by our overworked and at-risk mail carriers.

How the USPS has gotten to the point of imminent bankruptcy is a complicated story, with plenty of blame to go around. For more of the background, I refer you to Pat Nevada’s column in the Tuesday, May 19 edition of this paper. In brief, though, the USPS has not been taxpayer-funded for the past fifty years. Congress’s instructions to the Postal Regulatory Commission have made it challenging, if not outright impossible, for the USPS to maintain solvency.

Back in April, a bipartisan group of top lawmakers in the House of Representatives called on congressional leadership to provide emergency funding for the Postal Service in light of the agency’s financial crisis and the public’s vastly increased reliance on the mail during the coronavirus pandemic. The White House blocked the request. President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Treasury Secretary Stephen Minuchin have made it clear that they want the Postal Service to go bankrupt and for its operation to be privatized.

How you feel about privatization of a public service is likely to depend on whether you’re in line to reap any of the profits. Most of us are not.

The agency President Trump has called a “joke” may not be so much of a joke to many of us. If you’re not laughing, you may want to let your legislators know.

Carolyn George,

Gettysburg