Why It Is Absolutely Imperative That We Save the Post Office

I don’t want to brag, but I am the son and grandson of postmen. My grandfather worked for the post office his entire adult life while my dad worked for the postal service in college and became a devoted stamp collector. 

You could say that the post office is in my blood. As a small businessman perpetually shipping out packages for various crowd-funding campaigns I spend a LOT of time at the post office sending kind-hearted patrons autographed copies of the Weird Accordion to Al book. Since the quarantine, the only business I have visited regularly is the post office. 

I don’t just benefit from the post office: I need it. Without the low cost of media mail, it would be hard for me to make money through self-publishing. It’s a goddamn miracle that I’m able to make decent money self-publishing in the first place; if the government allows or encourages the post office to fail so that it can be privatized it would become much more difficult for me to keep my head above water financially. 

The post office exists now as an invaluable public service. If it were privatized then its overriding goal would be to maximize profits whether or not that meant screwing over customers like myself and massive layoffs or pay cuts. 

I dubbed Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic tribute to the post office, The Postman, a Secret Success in no small part due to my enduring love for the noble men and women who sort and deliver our mail. Though an infamous flop with critics and audiences alike, The Postman illustrates how essential mail delivery is to a functioning society, how it can give people hope and provide a sense of consistency and continuity to a world teetering on the brink of collapse. 

It sure as shit feels like the United States as a whole is teetering on the brink of collapse due to a toxic combination of terrible leadership and an unprecedented pandemic that promises to kill tens of thousands more people, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions unless it is contained and a cure is found. 

But the post office is particularly vulnerable. We’ve never needed a healthy post office more than we do now, when stores everywhere are shut down indefinitely and business is being handled largely through tele-conferencing and the mail.

Getting mail and going to the post office to send out large quantities to books makes me feel like at least part of the world is still working as it should. I am in awe of the everyday heroism of postmen and women who put their lives on the line every day, through rain, sleet, hail, snow and a global pandemic for modest wages, public mockery and the very real chance that the post office as we know it will cease to operate in the very near future because Republicans like Trump think that capitalism and privatization will solve every problem instead of causing them. 

The post office has been dealt a bad hand, most notably in the form of an insane 2006 law that forced it to pre-fund health benefits for 75 years. How fucking nuts is that? A Washington Post article on the crisis explained that this requirement, which does not apply to any other government agency, “essentially amounts to a credit card company saying, “You will charge a million dollars on your credit card during your life; please include the million dollars in your next payment.” 

Grover Norquist famously said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Trump and his evil minions want to do just that to the post office, and replace it with something soulless and commercial, that will answer only to stockholders and not to an American public that doesn’t just benefit from a sane and reasonable post office: it desperately needs one, now more than ever. 

Let’s save the post office from profiteers and vultures. It’s the least we can do for the men and women who deliver our mail even when that means putting their lives and their health on the line every time they go to work. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place in an unhappy time by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course you can buy my new book, the Weird Accordion to Al here

OR I will happily send you an autographed copy myself if you Paypal twenty dollars to nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net, shipping included, an offer I make because I fucking love the post office,

AND you can also buy my other new book, Postal, about the video game series and movie, over at https://bossfightbooks.com/products/postal-by-brock-wilbur-nathan-rabin