It’s been four months since we last looked at the good old post office, as I prefer to call it, and things here got worse before they finally got better.
The trough came in February when, on our rural route, the mail failed to arrive three consecutive days, and on the fourth — weirdly — it came after dark, a time it never had before.
The non-service all over town was so pervasive it became the talk of the comprehensive planning meeting that night, and the talk was not civil.
The remedy, so far as one can tell from watching the mailbox, was contracted labor. On not a few days, a small subcompact with a tiny U.S. Postal Service sticker pulled up and deposited the mail.
PORTLAND, ME – DECEMBER 4: A woman walks past the mail boxes on her way into the Portland Post Office Friday, Dec. 4, 2020. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer
Since the unofficial vehicle has been on the case, the mail has arrived every day, as it did for more than three decades to this address.
The irony is that, until a few years ago, only contracted private vehicles appeared — especially a Ford station wagon driven by a bearded gentleman who must have put on hundreds of thousands of miles.
The now frequently broken-down postal trucks — I see them regularly at a garage down the road — came later.
What does all this signify? It means that the federal government is neglecting one of its oldest, most basic and most important functions: delivering the mail.
A refresher course may be in order: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution charges Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” and “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper” to accomplish this task.
Congress subsequently made delivering First Class mail the priority function — not packages, not competing with FedEx and UPS, as current Postmaster General Henry DeJoy seems to believe, and has so ordered.
With impunity so far, DeJoy is deliberately undermining mail delivery by continuing to raise stamp prices while cutting service standards — the opposite of what any business that wants to keep or expand its customer base would do.
There’s been alarmingly little protest. Things have gotten so bad in Vermont that the state’s three-member congressional delegation fired off a letter to DeJoy in February saying, “These delays are nothing short of life-threatening for Vermonters who rely on the Postal Service for prescription medication delivery.”
Things aren’t much better in Maine, yet we’ve had no such full-throated protest from our four members of Congress.
There’s a major misunderstanding at work: DeJoy’s idea that because mail volumes have declined, they will inevitably continue to decline, and therefore we can abandon the idea that mail needs to be delivered on any sort of schedule.
The post office is a public service, one that predates even the Constitution; there were post offices in the colonies. Yes, businesses no longer need mail service to send and collect bills as much as they used to, but countless other vital commodities move that way, from prescriptions to hand-written valentines from grandchildren.
Not everyone wants to live their lives online, and many are, in fact, appalled by the prospect of having our vacuum cleaners uploading images to the Internet. The privacy offered by the mail is looking more and more attractive with each passing day.
Congress undertook some “major” reforms of the Postal Service last year that really don’t amount to much. One “major change” was forgiving pre-paid employee health charges that was nothing more than an accounting fiction.
Steering DeJoy away from his package obsession and back toward universal mail service was nowhere on the congressional agenda.
So it may come back to the president, as it often does. Joe Biden has been able to bestir himself to protest such things as hidden fees on resort and hotel bills.
Why not a plug for those who still faithfully send letters to the White House where they are, one presumes, receiving postmarked replies? He does remember letters, correct?
Specifically, Biden could call on his union friends on the Postal Board of Governors who are, unaccountably, still backing DeJoy, and suggest that he’s eminently replaceable.
There’s no reason we can’t have excellent mail and package delivery together, not one or the other.
As for new revenue and new services, one excellent suggestion from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others is to allow post offices to offer basic banking services, as they once did — especially valuable in poor urban neighborhoods where paycheck cashing services charging exorbitant rates are about all that’s available.
The post office is there to serve all of us. It’s about time it started doing that again.
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, commentator and reporter since 1984, is the author of three books, and is now researching the life and career of a U.S. Chief Justice. He welcomes comment at: drooks@tds.net
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