It's not only the recipients of mail who will suffer when the post office is shut down.. For years (again, this is not a new problem; it's just accelerated), for years I have felt sorry for postmen, postwomen, the mail deliverers, walkers all, with sore feet and aching backs. It's a secret not often divulged, but every once in a while one of them would go mad and start hiding letters in the closet or throwing them in a nearby river - this is an alternative to a time/warp machine more easily accessible to postpersons. Anyway, that's a method frowned upon by postal authorities. Is it better to eliminate the post office altogether? Apparently they think so, whoever they are. Well, also anyway, that was another reason I kept on writing snail mail letters, to reassure postpeople that they were an essential part of my/our life. Oh, look, a day without mail is like a day without sunshine. I'm so old I can remember when there was mail delivery on Saturday and I still resent there not being, especially when I visit my daughter in Boston and she gets mail on Saturday. I'll tell you who else is going to be impacted by the disappearance of the post office: greeting card makers (and writers); stationery purveyors (and artists); an entire section of our consumer society erased. I've been buying my better Hasti-Notes (odious term) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art store, really lovely cards called "embellished" and are they ever. But there, you see? I admit I order them online but they do have to be delivered. No aching feet or sore backs now. The future belongs to UPS.
Well, it's our fault, really. No one writes letters any more. It's not only email and time and attention spans that are to blame, it's also a complete lack of courtesy. For years and years I've had a thing about thank-you letters. It's one of my bench-marks, one of my criteria of judgement of people. But now, and for some time now, no one answers any mail short of a twitter. I don't know how business survives. In my own field, writing, you'd think literate human beings, who make their living by the word, would find time to reply to a query, a request, a pitch, a comment, but they do not. I read a science fiction story once about a dying planet that had run out of metal, its life-sustaining resource. Back here on earth someone invented some sort of time/space warp container that swallowed all metal refuse and disposed of it somehow. The inventor demonstrated his new tool by dropping old razor blades into it, pointing out that unsightly landfill of used cars would be a thing of the past. All used metal could be sent off the earth - to somewhere. Who cared? In the meantime, back on the dying planet, a razor blade clinked onto a barren moor. I used to have a theory that mailboxes were entry points to other planets: once you mailed a letter, it disappeared and you never heard of it, or from the recipient, again. And that's why the Post Office is going to disappear, like all the stuff one used to put into mailboxes. Others will suffer.