Postal Dinosaur

Passing through Manhattan on my way home, I snapped a few pictures before starting the last leg of the journey. Here I was at 34th Street & *th Avenue, looking past a tourist bus which has just passed the main US Post Office building in New York City.

If you had said to me 20 years ago that the Postal Service might close up shop some day, I'd have laughed, but now that's what we're looking at. The whole American society shares responsibility, but the government, the postal workers' union, and the management very clearly missed the gigantic signs of doom. I'll state what I think those were.

junk mail is not easy to explain to anyone from another country. In the 1980s & 90s, when it reached a peak, there would be a large pile of printed material, often in 4-color offset glossy finish, through your mail slot with every mail delivery, i.e. six times a week. This was not the only point where unwanted ads arrived, but it was the worst. I worked in a junk mail factory for a few months once. There was a 40% waste factor. That much of the paper used was wasted.

Think about it: 40% wasted, and then after the finished product made its way to the mail slot, something like 99.9% of it went in the trash --not recycling in most cases. It was a pointless slaughter of forests, but one did not need radical opinions to see that no matter who was benefiting, and no matter why this was happening, it could not possibly last. I would ask the letter carries what they thought of it, and they always had the same answer: Junk mail created the jobs of a huge percentage of postal workers. They had no problem with it.

Electronic mail has replaced snail mail. Why is there no internet giant within the postal service? I thought of this when a huge company called Tastycake went out of business. Labor activists were on it because as usual, the employees were getting screwed. But I said, Yes they deserve a fair deal at the end, but let's not forget what a Twinkie is. It was a famous American snack. The recipe is something like, "cardboard + sugar." My point is that for all the trillions of Twinkies that have been made and eaten, there never was one single moment when a person needed a Twinkie. Like the postal workers, the Tastycake folks never organized for changing the mission so that they might exist to provide essential products and services, rather than proudly wearing a sign on their hats that read, "Crap For Sale!"

For that matter why is there no banking at the post office, as there is in France, where it is used by poorer people, instead of the horribly exploitative check-cashing establishments of the USA.

For the moment I will end on an optimistic note. The present government shutdown, created by the Republican party as a tactic against affordable health care, is back-firing in their faces. The idiotic Right started an economic riot in the attempt to re-open finished business, wherein they lost the major arguments. But the people are disgusted and outraged. Perhaps in future, the suggestion of a French-style public service will not be automatically dismissed here. Maybe there will be enough intelligent leaders here to end general public policies that are plainly idiotic.