Save Our Post Office: Why Privatizing This Treasure Is a Bad

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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I'd say a country's postal service is an excellent indicator of how civilized it is -- and there is no place like England for that. You can mail a letter in London in the morning and it will arrive somewhere else in the city in time for tea that afternoon. Pretty brilliant.

Our U.S. Postal Service is precious too, established by the Founding Fathers in 1789 to spread democracy and dialogue among the 13 states. I love the little things about the post office, too, like a hand cancel (an ink stamp and a keepsake of when and where a letter originated.) And in my book, 44 cents is a small price to pay to connect with any one of 300 million of us.

But alas, the Postal Service is running in the red and again there's serious talk of ending Saturday mail delivery and shuttering scores of local post office branches. Let's not let this happen.

The Washington Post recently ran a hard-nosed editorial arguing this national treasure should be totally privatized -- not what we need, thousands of job losses in times like these. Another reason that would be a big mistake is that neighborhoods all over America would really miss their post offices. We need more open public spaces, not fewer, where everyone has a right or reason to be.

Someone on Capitol Hill will kick this can around, hold a committee hearing and perhaps come to his senses, realizing the mail is not something a democracy can completely outsource. Congress oversees the Postal Service now, which is run very much like a business by the Postmaster General. But even if there's a shortfall of $2-to-$3 billion, as there was last year, so what? That's a song in the scheme of trillions spent on two wars spent since 2003. The ties between the federal government and the postal service are too vital to our well-being to be severed.

We the people are on a slippery slope in thinking everything can be done digitally. There's nothing like the human hand, writing words on paper, intended for another individual.

The Founding Fathers created the post office, along with institutions including Congress and the Treasury, because they knew correspondence on paper was something sacred in a self-respecting Republic. This is true to the sender and reader, but also to the circulation and free flow of ideas and news.

Stamps are in a way equalizers of us all as they cut across distance and 50 state lines -- helping us to cohere as a nation, just as the founders envisioned. One stamp equals another, no matter who sends what to whom, whether in California or Wisconsin.

At the time our own postal service was getting organized, English novelist Jane Austen wrote a soliloquy in her sparkling novel "Emma," in which the character Jane Fairfax said it best:

"The post office is a wonderful establishment! . . . If one thinks of all that it has to do . . . it is really astonishing! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is ever carried wrong -- and not one in a million, I suppose, actually lost!"

Jane Fairfax had a special reason for going alone to the post office along to fetch her letters -- as I did to ask for a hand ink stamp on my sister's birthday card the other day. Few things in life are as personal and yet as public as correspondence. There are a myriad of reasons to keep the mail service running six days out of seven at a cost everybody can afford -- because in the end it is priceless.

[Lounge Lizard]

"I'd say a country's postal service is an excellent indicator of how civilized it is -- and there is no place like England for that. You can mail a letter in London in the morning and it will arrive somewhere else in the city in time for tea that afternoon. Pretty brilliant. " - about a century out of date on that one.

[westlondonpostie]

"I'd say a country's postal service is an excellent indicator of how civilized it is -- and there is no place like England for that. You can mail a letter in London in the morning and it will arrive somewhere else in the city in time for tea that afternoon. Pretty brilliant. " - about a century out of date on that one.

Not really, 25 years ago we were doing 3 deliveries a day in my office,
18 years ago when we still had processing any 1st class post for our area that had come in on the 9 and 10am collections would be sorted and delivered on the 2nd delivery that day.