Dear Kansas — Can We At Least Not Fight About The Postal Service? | C.J. Janovy

By C.J. Janovy, The Kansas Reflector

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Aug. 13, 2020

If anything shouldn’t be political, it’s the U.S. Postal Service.

I know it’s mandated by the Constitution and sometimes needs funding help from Congress, so it’s inherently political, but these are special times.

In May, Republican megadonor Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general. In July, he announced supposed cost-cutting changes that could slow down delivery. By the time he shook up management last week, Democrats were calling for investigations.

DeJoy’s actions were alarming enough that one Republican senator, Steve Daines of Montana, urged DeJoy to reverse his policies.

Only the most gangrene-hearted partisans would want to undermine the Postal Service.

“It’s what binds the community,” says Amanda Beckley, a letter carrier in Garden City who is one of 5,905 Kansans who work for the Postal Service. “You can’t go to the post office in a small town without running into someone you know. The smaller the town, the more of a social spot it is.”

Beckley grew up in western Kansas. As a kid, she’d go to check the mail at Holcomb’s post office, then on Main Street. She also remembers visiting her grandparents, who had a P.O. box in Lewis.

“They had to drive 15-20 miles to get to it because they literally lived in the middle of nowhere,” Beckley says. “It was a big deal. When we’d go to town, we’d go by the bank and the post office.”

She’s carried letters for 19 years — first in Wichita and for the past eight years in Garden City, where her route is an 11-mile walk. She’s struck by the kindness of people in western Kansas, and gets a little emotional talking about the early days of the pandemic.

“People put notes on their mailbox — the appreciation for us, you know, in such an uncertain moment to know that we were still there every day,” she says.

Delivering mail, you end up knowing a community better than it might know itself.

“You experience deaths,” Beckley says. “I’m on a route where there are quite a few older people, and sometimes we’re a guarantee every day — the mailman’s going to be there, even if just to visit for a minute or two.”

She knows how the mail can be an economic indicator. Before the Great Recession, she was seeing a lot of loan applications. All of that stopped sometime in 2008-‘09. Over the past dozen years, her deliveries have changed thanks to online shopping. But evolving consumer habits don’t mean the Postal Service’s business model is hopelessly outdated.

“UPS and FedEx drop with us every day — we take it the last mile for them,” Beckley explains. “All of us are interconnected. The difference between us and them is we go to every address in America every day.”

She remembers how, when she first started in Wichita, it was just after 9/11 and someone was sending anthrax through the mail.

“It was another weird moment in history,” Beckley says.

The Bush administration’s bioterrorism response plan included getting vaccines to everyone quickly through the U.S. Mail.

Americans used to agree on the importance of maintaining that sort of infrastructure.

DeJoy estimated Postal Service losses could reach $11 billion this year. That’s a lot, but it’s $5 billion less than, say, this year’s coronavirus relief for farmers.

Both are investments in the Kansas way of life.

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran agrees, in principle, and has worked with a Democratic colleague on a bill to “put the Postal Service on firmer financial footing.” I asked the senator’s spokesman for a comment on whether DeJoy’s recent actions aligned with Moran’s vision, but haven’t heard back.

Maybe he could just sign on to Daines’ letter, given how the Postal Service is one of the country’s largest employers of veterans.

“All career employees raise their right hand and take an oath to serve,” Beckley says of her Postal Service coworkers. “I didn’t serve, I’m not a veteran, but I can’t help but think when they raised their hands and swore an oath to serve the Constitution a second time, you don’t do that lightly.”

Post office workers don’t just bring junk, bills, medicine or money, lifelines from loved ones and, most recently, political postcards delivered faithfully regardless of how a carrier feels about their content. The postal service also delivers normalcy.

“In any time of trauma in a city, a city knows that it’s going to be OK when the mail starts coming again,” Beckley notes.

We’re all enduring a trauma right now. Making sure the U.S. Postal Service is OK is the least we could do in return for its service.

The Kansas Reflector seeks to increase people's awareness of how decisions made by elected representatives and other public servants affect our day-to-day lives. We hope to empower and inspire greater participation in democracy throughout Kansas.