I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter,
And make believe it came from you…
— “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” by Fred Ahlert and Joe Young, 1935.
The US Postal Service is having a hard time of it lately, and I partly blame myself.
I have a book of stamps sitting in my drawer, along with a bunch of blank envelopes. They’ve been there for over two years, untouched. I could have been writing letters to people — meaningful messages — and using those stamps to mail the letters, but instead I’ve spent way too much time ‘Liking’ various entertaining (but occasionally mean-spirited) political memes on Facebook.
And now, the Post Office is on the verge of bankruptcy. They were asking Congress for a $75 billion ‘COVID’ subsidy just to help them keep the lights on, never mind delivering the mail in a timely fashion. They ended up getting $10 billion.
I take part of the responsibility. But I’d been hesitant to use the stamps, because they had American flags printed on them, along with the word, “FOREVER”. Would the recipients of my letters think I was a flag-waving Republican? Or worse yet, a flag-waving Republican, forever?
We’ll never know, because the stamps and the blank envelopes just sat there in the drawer. And now, it might be too late.
President Trump has been trying to turn the Titanic … he has referred to the Post Office as “a joke”, so maybe he’s actually trying to point the Titanic more accurately at the iceberg… But whatever his intentions, he’s appointed one of his buddies, longtime Republican fundraiser Louis DeJoy, as our new Postmaster General.
That may have been a mistake. I am immediately suspicious of anyone with the word “Joy” in their name. It seems like all of the women I’ve ever known, who were christened by their parents with the name “Joy”, have been gloomy worrywarts who wouldn’t recognize the bluebird of happiness if it flew up their noses.
To judge by the photos available on the Internet, Louis DeJoy doesn’t appear exceptionally somber. But he does look a bit like a used car salesman, intent on selling me a piece of automotive junk for top dollar and smiling all the way to the bank.
I’m going to cut him some slack, however, because I like his first name. Because it’s my first name.
As the pandemic drags on, Congressional Democrats are now pushing to include $25 billion in additional aid to the USPS and $3.5 billion in “supplemental election funding” as part of the next phase of coronavirus relief. But President Trump has vowed not to approve the emergency funds. In a Fox News interview last week, the President said, “Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of [mail-in] ballots… Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”
How we got to this place — where we can’t figure out how to hold a successful election during a silly little public health crisis, just because the current President won’t approve the funding — I blame myself for that. I had all those stamps sitting in my drawer, afraid to use them because people might take me for a Republican…
And just general laziness, too, I guess. Or maybe I didn’t feel like I had anything worth writing about?
Really, I could come up with a million excuses — some, more painful than others. Like the fact that all those blank envelopes sitting in the drawer, and all those stamps, were the ones I bought originally to mail the alimony payments to Darlene, before she got remarried to that jerk from Phoenix.
I guess the Republicans in Washington have their own excuses, such as the extreme danger that unsavory elements might use the US Postal Service to cast mail-in ballots for Democratic candidates this coming November.
A million excuses. But here we are, with a nearly bankrupt Post Office.
My dear old dad, God rest his soul, loved to quote a phrase used by one-time Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at the 1962 funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt. “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness…” Of course, things were a lot different in 1962. You could buy a candle for 5 cents… and a postage stamp for a first class letter would set you back a whole 4 cents. But even back then, you could curse the darkness absolutely free of charge, so I didn’t fully understand why a penny-pincher like my dad would quote Adlai Stevenson.
Be that as it may, I’m making myself a promise this morning — to help save our Post Office. I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter, and I’m not gonna make believe it came from anyone who might have dumped me for a guy from Phoenix. This is no time for make-believe. I’m gonna stick two first class stamps on the envelope. No… make that three stamps.
“Forever” stamps.