I thought people loved the mail? I sure do. Just think of all the fond memories it enables you to have: collecting stamps, writing love letters, having pen pals, sending postcards, receiving birthday cards with money stuffed inside, and best of all, excitedly checking the mailbox every day after school to find out if you got into your top choice for college.
Sure, the mail can also be annoying. Your box filled with bills, speeding tickets, coupons, circulars, flyers and other junk mail advertising that you simply don’t want any part of. And besides, most key correspondence takes place nowadays via email anyway. But, you’d have to admit that checking your mail is still kind of exciting. You don’t know what’s going to be inside. It could be something bad but it also could be something good. It’s a venerable grab bag of possibilities.
But the days of checking your mailbox may soon be coming to an end. After months of rhetoric where he planted the idea that election results delivered primarily via mail in ballots wouldn’t be trustworthy (even though he votes by mail), President Trump has now resorted to openly trying to disrupt the operations of the United States Post Office so that people won’t be able to mail in ballots at all, especially in Democratic leaning areas.
His tactics have included appointing a Trump donor (Louis DeJoy) to head up the Post Office to oversee its dismantling, removing key personnel, withholding funding, getting rid of shelving and sorting machines to make it harder to sort and deliver the mail and worst of all, physically removing mailboxes from around blue leaning neighborhoods in key swing states.
Things are so dire that recently 48 out of the 50 states warned that at the current rate they can’t fully guarantee that all ballots will be counted by Election Day. A brewing scandal that will make what happened with Gore, Bush and the hanging chads seem like child’s play.
I can’t believe I have to say this: but we really should be saving the United States Post Office. It is an incredibly valuable service that brings people items they literally cannot live without. But don’t take my word for it. Take Barack Obama’s:
Which is why it may be time to call in the big guns:
Playing devil’s advocate for a second, and ignoring the fact that it’s established in the constitution, do we really need a government sanctioned Post Office? Won’t free markets solve the problem of delivering the mail with companies like FedEx and UPS stepping up? Or can’t a large corporation like Amazon just buy the Post Office to help lower their own delivery costs? Perhaps. And as far as this particular election goes, even without a functioning Post Office, you could still enable people to vote remotely using drop boxes.
But ultimately that’s beside the point because you’d still need the ballots to get delivered via the mail in the first place and there are countless other reasons why you’d need a functioning Post Office. The fact that all this is happening during a pandemic, when it is literally not safe to go to a polling place, makes it all the more appalling. This election was already a matter of life or death considering the current state of the economy, race relations, and Trump’s policies on Climate Change. Now the mere act of voting in of itself is also literally a life or death endeavor if people are forced to vote in person during a pandemic. This whole mess really is peak 2020:
But we will prevail in the end. After all:
The time has come to save the United States Post Office.
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