It’s wicked, you think, as you read over and over again the list of facilities in the District the U.S. Postmaster General wants to close within the next six months. It’s unconscionable that entire communities could be left without any post office. You get Creole crazy, launching into a full and high decibel rant. Your neighbors could accept the closing of the Brightwood station. But postal officials also want to shutter Petworth. Seniors citizens and others can’t be expected to travel across the whole city searching for a post office. This can’t be allowed to happen.
“I will oppose any closings in the District, unless postal services are otherwise made available in local retail, federal buildings, libraries or similar facilities,” says D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
As far as you’re concerned, that’s no tall order. Postal officials already have said they intend to install kiosks in stores and community facilities.
Please. Safeway is no post office. It’s barely a decent supermarket.
Some people say the USPS should privatize. Others say the postmaster should increase the cost for bulk–or, speaking in the vernacular, junk–mail. But, please, just don’t raise the price of the first class stamp.
Truth be told, you are more distressed about closing the Adams Morgan facility: your first love among post offices. Just after your divorce, when you worried your grandfather would think you unstable if you kept changing addresses, you rented a box. It gave a semblance of permanence. That was more than 20 years ago.
You still love taking the bus there twice a week, chatting with staff and joking with customers–some of whom you’ve known since those early days. You even enjoy, on occasion, running into Councilman Jim Graham–imagine that.
Post offices aren’t simply depots for purchasing stamps or shipping off packages at Christmas time. They are critical cultural institutions that reflect America’s history and an important aspect of its daily life.
There should be a national campaign to preserve them.
Remember “The Postman?” It’s 2013. Global society has collapsed. America is a wasteland. A group of people fights to resurrect the postal service as a way to restore civilization.
Where is Kevin Costner when you need him?
Your friends–social media practitioners–say you should jump into the 21st Century.
They say, hook up that Gmail or Yahoo account; create a Facebook page; and communicate in 140 characters. They say abandon print. Stop licking those ghastly white envelopes
You’re addicted–but not to glue. You can’t kick your love affair with the fine but lost art of letter writing. Sending handwritten notes and cards satisfies your soul.
What would have happened, you wonder, if there were no Postal Agency where Gabriel Garcia Marquez could put Florentino Ariza to write his passionate missives to Fermina Daza? Would there have been no “Love in the Time of Cholera”?
Thinking about that makes you southern sick.
Can someone, please, bring the smelling salts?
jonetta rose barras can be reached at [email protected]
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
