Let me suggest a sure fire way Barack Obama can win a second term. Stand in the doorway of a post office scheduled for closing and declare, “Not on my watch.” He will be standing with tens of millions of Americans who are rising up to defend our must trusted and ubiquitous public institution.
Last year 3600 communities were put on notice that they will likely lose their local post office. “We will start to see post offices closing at the rate of a hundred a week,” predicts Steve Hutkins whose Save the Post Office is by far the single best source of information on all things post office. “They've been closing at a rate of one hundred a year for the past 40 years.” The Postmaster General promises to close half of the country's 32,000 post offices over the next four years.
The high handedness with which the post office is undermining our communities infuriates growing numbers. Speaking for many, one lady in Lodi, Texas writes, “It appears that the USPS has set these closing procedures on autopilot and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop them…They don’t actually ‘study’ a post office for closure; they target it for closure and then proceed to process it. There is NO careful consideration made.”
A nationwide grassroots resistance is emerging that cuts across party lines, uniting rich and poor, rural and urban, black, white and Hispanic. They are fighting to save a government institution that fundamentally contributes to their sense of community, of social cohesion of well-being. “The postal service tries to say there is no historical significance to (our) post office”, writes William Duncan, a resident of Grapevine, Arkansas. “We beg to differ. 131 years in a community is historical no matter where you are located. It is the only office remaining in our community, due to school consolidations. But, without the post office, Grapevine no longer exists. It becomes a place, not a community.
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