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In this Discussion
- 1234 September 2011
- curt September 2011
- Death September 2011
- joey September 2011
- kdawg September 2011
- lml__0_0__lml September 2011
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- Matthew September 2011
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- swamp_knobbler_mahan September 2011
- YoursTruly September 2011
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62688.html
Our income directly relies on the post office, too.
I can't picture myself relying on FedEx and UPS for everything.
As a passionate stamp collector and sender/receiver of elaborate letters and packages I tend to get pretty angry when anyone complains about the cost of mailing things and the service at the post office. In Anacortes it tends to be old men who say things like "I remember back when sending a letter would cost 5 cents, the prices have gone up and the service certainly hasn't gotten any better!" loudly while waiting in line.
One time I tried to explain to two old grouches the magic of getting to see the handwriting of a far-away someone you miss for less than a dollar and one of them asked "You get letters in the mail?".
It's surprising the amount of people who just don't get or send mail for any other purpose than bills and paperwork.
I live in a world of mail, I feel nervous.
it's sad when ways of life change
I wish people still had to bring their own utensils to restaurants
I wish everyone still knew how to make butter
Shit fades away as culture changes, and it is fucking sad/melancholy
We are now finally old enough to be realizing how the old saw about "everything changes" actually directly affects our way of life, and how disturbing it is. And yet, it happens. The post office is not eternal. In 3,000 years there's no reason there should still be a post office (or literacy/books, or an animal industry, or health insurance, or America).
We're doing ancient Greece in my class right now and it's like impossible to even talk about because it's so long ago and almost every facet of life was so fundamentally different. They are aliens to us. But I bet they'd be sad if they knew that in the year 2011 there were no more togas or whatever. That slaves had been given rights. That their entire religious system has literally been dead and ancient for thousands of years--that there is not one single person on the face of the earth who still believes in Zeus. Heavy!
Post office: Zeus
And yet the fact remains that I love the post office and will cry if it goes away.
"When I was young you could put a piece of paper in a box by your front door, and a person would come and get it and take it to the person whose name you'd written on it, and it only cost 33 cents."
"What's a cent, grandma?"
Might be good business for local courier services.
or like, how easily our food supply system could break down (oil!)
yuck
I think comparing the Post Office to people bringing their own utensils to restaurants, or churning their own butter, or togas is so over the top it's unfair.
I get that you are making a joke, but in my opinion USPS shutting down is akin to all those other things rich countries have that Americans can't take for granted, like health care and education and shit.
The change is creepy because we are still in the practice of distributing stuff.
But the way I see, those changes you mention were gradual. It wasn't like "poof" no one wears togas or churns butter anymore. Eliminating the Post Office is going to kill small town life in my opinion. You can still get mail delivered to the most rural of rural areas in this Country, a drastic change will be nearly impossible to adjust to, computer illiterate people will be left in limbo.
There are some places where the Post Office is just someone running it in their basement, it's a labor of love. I can't help thinking of those old traditional Post Office buildings at the heart of so many American small towns shutting down. It would be so fucking dark.
The lines in every Post Office I've ever been to (from Anacortes, WA to Volcano, HI) lead me to believe that this service is still crucial to the livelihood of many.
On a different note, an interesting Wikipedia fact:
"The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters."
It will be like the railroads shutting down, which did indeed destroy many small towns and many people's livelihoods, as well as fundamentally altering the landscape of just day-to-day American life. It's crazy to contemplate what the post-USPS world would even look like. Its demise would transform so many other facets of life. And it would force an enormous portion of the non-internet-literate population onto the internet (paying bills, etc), with probably disastrous results, like you say. It's deeply unsettling for sure. And also really tragic and sad in a cosmic sense, all those destroyed connections. Seems REALLY regressive.
Those old railroad stops, now ghost towns with dust blowing through them! How DEVASTATED people were when their train stop closed. Literally just the death knell of an entire community. Not to mention the death knells that came before, with the building of the railroads in the first place---towns fighting desperately to be on the line, to be a train stop. Knowing that if they were cut out of this, they'd be cut out of everything. Towns that lucked into being along the railroad tracks would prosper; everybody else would not.
And after that, the building of the freeways, which cut off countless small towns from travelers who used to traverse the network of rural roads and highways. Next-generation railroad towns: CAR TOWNS, now ghost towns.
What will happen when the freeways are replaced by flying cars? What will happen to all those horrible strip mall towns lining our freeways. They will die as well.
It's strange that all these technologies that supposedly widen up our experience of the world (train, car), allowing us to go "wherever we want" faster and more easily, actually limit where we do go. People used to walk all over the place, now we just go where the roads are.
It's interesting to think of the post office as being aligned with travel in our world. A vast network of connections and possible connections, between towns and people and income sources. Severed overnight?? So extreme.
Fucked up
TRAVEL
MOVEMENT
DISCOURSE
ISOLATION
STAGNATION
NARROWNESS
You know who uses the postal service? OLD PEOPLE! You know who votes reliably? OLD PEOPLE!
Congress will get their shit together eventually like they did with the TSA.
Kdawg: I am not feeling your optimism. Old people die eventually. Last year I saw this thing on Fox where all the anchors were in disbelief that there are more Post Offices than McDonald's in the United States. This woman was all like "I haven't been to a Post Office in five years!".
In an emotional moment I have started a new blog I have no time for:
http://perdusdanslaposte.tumblr.com/
NPR's report is more encouraging
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/07/140242044/money-shortage-could-hinder-mail-delivery
"Senators from both sides of the aisle repeated throughout the hearing -they think there should be a fix - and it can be bipartisan. They said the postal service is too big a part of the U.S. economy to let it go out of business."
Plus it looks like our guy is working on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/business/white-house-to-propose-plan-to-help-postal-service.html
You're on your own.
Is there fucking in that movie?!
Tom Petty stepped lightly through the old, abandoned theater, but the creaking floorboards still echoed through the cavernous space.
"Some place," Tom muttered to no one.
It takes place in a future where the federal government lost control, and only exists in the "east." In the Pacific Northwest, where the book takes place, towns and communities are basically on their own and don't trust anyone. This guy finds an old Postal Service truck in the woods, with the skeleton still wearing the uniform and a bag of unopened mail in the back. (Kind of like when Hurley and Sawyer find the old Dharma bus with beer in it.)
So he puts on the uniform, grabs the sack of mail and starts trying to deliver the letters. The ordinarily suspicious townfolk let him in because he has a letter addressed to one of the residents. Then they give him a bunch of mail to send to their friends and relatives in other towns whom they haven't heard from in years.
Anyway, his presence gives everyone hope that civilization will return and the federal government will restore order throughout the land. I don't remember the dramatic climax, but for some reason someone wanted him dead so there's a fight scene in the woods.
I remember thinking that the movie wouldn't be very good because it was Kevin Costner saving people in a post apocalyptic world (a la "Water World"), but I never saw it.
It's ALMOST EXACTLY like Waterworld, except more like "Ground World".
It was bad and sappy.
But the real shame is Star Wars on Blu Ray.