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Lost In America

The Sad State of the US Postal System

By Zane LarkinPublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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Lost In America
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Not to be confused with UPS, the USPS (United States Postal Service), has been in the business of collecting, sorting, and delivering America's mail for almost two centuries. As a federally regulated service, the USPS has been responsible for people-- no matter where in the country they may live or how far out of reach they may seem-- getting their mail. And for quite a number of years out of that time, they've been a reliable service that could be depended upon to do the job. Recently however, things have changed.

It's no surprise to anyone who's ever been to a post office in America that it is a bureaucratic institution. The lines are long, the workers are never quite available to help you with what you need at the moment you need them to be, and at the end of the day they'd much rather redirect you to machines or automated processes than help you personally. Then again in today's world, almost every business operates in that way, and anyone who's ever called a business and had to deal with one of their 'pretend person' robots instead of getting to talk to a real person will know this.

Recently however, it now seems that this lackluster service is taking on a more definite and intentional aspect, with mail being senselessly rerouted around the country before finally setting off to its intended destination and certified mail getting so lost in the system that even the post office themselves don't know that it actually got delivered and still have it as 'lost' in their records. Both of those things have happened recently to family members of mine, and if they've happened to you too and you're anything like me, you've probably done a little digging of your own into why this has become such a commonplace thing.

On the 10th of June 2021, the Chicago Sun Times reported that Postmaster General DeJoy had purposefully slowed mail delivery down during the pandemic, and doubled down on those efforts in order to slow down mail-in ballots. As the head of the US post office, one would probably wonder why he would do such a thing that would make make the organization he is in charge of look so bad and ineffective. So let's take a closer look at DeJoy himself and see.

Louis DeJoy was appointed Postmaster General in May 2020 by President Trump, and a quick Google search of his name will reveal that he is currently under investigation by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), a Republican, and former head of XPO Logistics (which gives him ties to a business in direct competition with the postal service for delivering both mail and packages). Further looking will reveal that both he and his wife are large donors not just to the Republican party, but to Trump personally, and there is actually an entire Forbes article located here which goes over how everyone on the board of directors for the post office is in some way tied to Trump and the GOP.

But alright, you might be saying, so the guy has ties to Trump. How does that tie into him wanting to slow down the delivery of the country's mail?

Well, for starters, one should take note that this particular action escalated in its intensity during the 2020 presidential election, when most of the country was relying on mail-in ballots in order to cast their votes. It's no secret that Trump is against the mail-in ballots (especially when they were counted to show that he lost) and those Republicans who unite with Trump (and some who don't) also contest those votes and believe that the fact that they were mailed in allowed for them to be tampered with. In the wake of subsequent court cases calling for the removal of those ballots from the official count, there has come a circumstantially-supported belief that DeJoy purposefully tried to slow down the delivery of potential ballots (along with regular mail in general) in order to prevent them from being received and counted in time for the election. And then Republicans want to talk about election tampering.

Since around the time of that report, DeJoy has been under investigation by the FBI, and while this slow-down of the mail has been going on for the better part of a year, just recently people seem to be actively taking notice. There was a news story on CBS about it where DeJoy was named as the main initiator of the slow-down and his ties to Trump were mentioned as a possible cause. There was also, within the past week of publication of this article, a petition from MoveOn.org calling for the removal of DeJoy as Postmaster General.

While an effect of DeJoy's policies regarding the post may have been an increase in the use of other companies such as UPS and FedEx, there are still a substantial number of Americans who rely on the post office not only for the safe and timely delivery of their personal mail and packages, but also important documents such as death certificates. And those people are currently being knowingly short-changed for what appears to be the political agenda of a very small number of people. One which no longer has any bearing on anything, and yet for some reason continues to persist.

I am unsure why it has taken the greater majority of the country quite so long to figure out that our mail is being willfully messed with, lost, misplaced, and shuffled about in a way which makes no logical sense, but I retain hope that now that it has garnered some attention, something will actually be done about it.

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About the Creator

Zane Larkin

I'm not a journalist, but I do publish like one.

Promising dogs, cats, politics and good old-fashioned common sense. Let's keep things civil.

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