The history of the US Post Office is a history of facing danger, of staring it right in the eyes from up close and being daunted not for a minute. The history of the US Post Office is a history of taking care of the American people. Find out what the post office was looking for in its mail carriers in the 1860s. Shocking really. Listen to what they faced during the 1918 Spanish flu. Shocking again, really.
Today we hear news reports calling our mail-carriers courageous for risking their lives daily in the face of covid19. True enough; they are both courageous and risking their lives daily and are willing to do it because they know the critical importance of their job. By the way, in addition to the mail carriers, the postal gloved and masked workers who face lines of customers daily from behind glass partitions risk infection by droplets, the processors who sort mail dropped into mail-slots from coast to coast and beyond are handling mail that may have been contaminated. Does that stop them for a minute? No. It never did.
Their motto, which is familiar to us all, you know the one about neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night, comes from something that may surprise you. And, their mission statement, get a box of Kleenex. The very poetry of it! Even in good times this mission statement is blubber-time, but now in the face of the coronavirus, when families have been ripped apart, it is doubly heart-wrenching. When we are suffering fear, depression and anxiety from isolation and loneliness and when we feel we have been cut adrift in a sea of uncertainty, it is the United States Post Office that eases the pain.
Without the United States Post Office we would be a nation in real trouble. And, today with the world as ruptured as it is, I see that we can add two more items to their mission list? Do you know what they would be? Please listen to a history that has a life-saving impact on every one of us.
I hope you will pass this history around far and wide so we can put an end to any conversation that does not give the US Post Office and all its workers the respect, gratitude and admiration it deserves. I hope you will be reminded of the courage, love and romance built into every stamp you put on that envelope.
