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An Imperfect Storm

Was there ever a more perfect gathering
of incompetence and maliciousness 
than the Post Office and the people
who want to kill the Post Office?

 If standing in line at a post office
is not the most exquisite of dismal tortures,
then what is?  Listening to Congress talk about it?

 It is reasonable that people who work in places
like the Post Office have regular breaks.  
But at the Post Office, the breaks come
between taking your money and giving you change.
That is not true, of course:  the breaks come
as you near the head of the slow-shuffle line.  

 People who have skill at dealing with the public
are not permitted to work at the Post Office.
I am speaking now of the people at the counter:
who knows what goes on behind the Maginot Line?
But I will wager that every one of us could 
put together a maddening list of P. O. employees
who have found imaginative ways to make the line move slower;
who were thrown out of pre-school, grade school, 
and charm school because they could not smile,
and who can make weighing an envelope
into an afternoon's work and a cosmic event.

 There are people in Congress who hate the Post Office
for all the wrong reasons:  they want to get rid of it,
and turn the whole enterprise over to a good, old-fashioned
profit-making company owned by a good, old-fashioned
asset management firm that will sell off the properties,
cut mail service to unprofitable places with thin populations,
and charge as much as it takes to bring back the Pony Express,
so long as the riders do not form a union or ask for a living wage.

 Post offices have been major players in fashioning
modern societies, guaranteeing access to information 
to everyone, not just those who live in population centers.
They have tied the whole world together, 
not because delivering mail to the panhandle of Idaho
or to Mali or the Yukon made a profit, but because
access to information, especially when almost all information
was printed on pieces of paper, was what held families
together, made democratic political decision-making possible,
and brought parts for the mower, and a baseball glove.

 The blame for the dismal state of our Post Office 
is shared between the people who run it, 
and the people who tell it how to run.  
The Post Office is a quasi-governmental agency, 
and Congress is a quasi-intelligent-governing agency.  
It is a marriage arranged by a wood-burning, 
paper-communications dating service.  

 The only thing worse might be 
a takeover by something like Bain Capital:  
not an arranged marriage, exactly, 
but love as a profit-making enterprise.

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