And check out this John Oliver piece on the post office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ
******************************************************************************
Getting rid of the post office? Really? No more mail? Or does
our fearful leader intend that his friends will open competing mail services
that one could subscribe to for an arm and a leg and maybe a first born child?
You might even have a greater than 50% chance of receiving
your item and it would be delivered in whatever the heck time-frame his friends
feel is appropriate for the unimportant lower classes. And of course, if they
lose an item there would be no recourse because of course everything for big
business, and who cares if your Aunt Margie doesn’t get her birthday present or
her card or her meds? If she were only magnificently rich, she’d have someone
to get those things for her, or be able to afford a top notch, top cost option.
55 cents is what it now costs to send a note or birthday
card or bill through the mail no matter where it is going – even to Hawaii. One can send a letter that is 1 ounce or less to England for a mere $1.20. That
is about 1/5 the price of a vente latte with almond milk. What would 45’s
friends charge - $1.20 for a "second-class" stamp to get your bill paid (they'll all be considered 'second-class,' though they might have a different service for their 'first-class' friends), and $20.00 to send
that 5 pound birthday present to your friend and have it take a week or two (a
large flat rate box that would take 2 days is about that amount now)? Maybe an
extra $10 if you want to insure it…
With no more post office I wonder if we’ll even be able to
get a bill or a package or a birthday card. Will this kill our small towns? Even
Fed Ex and UPS often give over that last leg of the journey to the post office.
How will you pay your bills? How will you even get your bill
if there is no mail service? If you don’t have internet, you’ll have to actually
go to your local gas company or electric company or water company every month
in order to pay your bill, and even to know how much the bill is. Unless they
are going to call everyone to tell them; that is not going to happen. Will they
just decide that they cannot serve these out of the way communities any longer
because there is no way to get paid for the service, and their offices are generally farther away.
Goodbye gas, electric,
water in small towns in the middle of our great country. We can make America
the wild wild whatever again. Dig your own well and put up some solar panels or
those “cancer producing” windmills to get your own power.
How will people who are ill or old and shut in be able to
get their medications? Maybe we can figure out how to use plants and herbs to heal
ourselves and get rid of the pharmaceutical companies (that wouldn’t
necessarily be all bad). Will Amazon take over the mail service? I’m
sure that they can.
If 45 is trying to hurt Jeff Bezos, he may be, instead,
giving him a new avenue in – the mail street. Trying to hamper and hamstring
someone who is creative and savvy is not really very clever. I wonder if Bezos already has a team working on it.
It’s like 45 is saying we’re going to close up the mouse hole
and that will fix our problem. His minuscule intellect is not aware that the
mouse can come out a thousand different ways.
I love my mail. I love getting my Netflix DVDs, I even love getting my circulars that tell me who has a sale on
avocados or bananas or strawberries. I love getting snail mail – I don’t get
much, but recently a friend wrote me a LONG handwritten letter that reminded me
of the hundreds of letters I used to send and receive over the years. It was
the only way my boyfriend and I, who lived 3000 miles apart, could tell one another
how much we loved each other. I’m glad that we couldn’t just text or e-mail.
There is something about sitting down and thinking out what to say, and writing
it carefully so that it could be read (my hand writing’s been atrocious my
entire life), that is quite delightful.
And all those amazing and wonderful stamps. I have stamps with Disney villains and Toy Story heroes. I have stamps
with birds and flowers and planets and rock stars. Stamps with scenes from the
revolutionary war and the civil war. I have stamps with Regan’s face and Shirley
Tempe’s face, Scientists faces, and Latin Musician's faces.
If 45 takes away our post office, I am sure that someone will come up
with something, because Americans are nothing if not creative problem solvers (at least some of them - usually the younger ones). But our 55 cent days may be over. Some of the post office's financial troubles are because the Post Office was hamstrung and limited in some of their financial matters. Check out the John Oliver segment for more on that.
So my friends who have
refused to pay their bills on line might be forced to move into the 21st
century.
45 can try to kill the real American spirit,
but as long as there are inspirational leaders and light bearers like
Barack and Michelle Obama inspiring us to keep our dreams alive, his royal darkness cannot
completely take over.
It might be advisable, however, to start focusing on what we want
rather than what we don’t want. The blessings rather than the curses, the joy
rather than the pain and fear, the possibilities rather than the downsides. If
we can do that, we can probably keep our post office or get something even
better. I have hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment