Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you know that the Post Office is under attack. And if you have been living under a rock, lucky you! You don’t need mail. But the rest of us do. Unfortunately, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy of the “You Can All Go Fuck Yourselves” DeJoys has been doing his darnedest to disrupt the Postal Service.
Now I’m not going to go into all the reasons why a functioning postal service is supremely important. The bullet point version would detail how it’s the way most people get their paychecks and retirement benefits and medicine delivered, especially in rural America. And I’m not going to go into why this clusterfuckery appears to be happening. Hint: it’s happening because everything the Trump administration touches dies. Including 175,000+ Americans this year alone because of Trump’s botched COVID-19 response.
What I am going to talk about is how the postal service brought me the greatest gift ever when I was 7 years old — my membership card to the Star Wars Fan Club.
I was a child of the ‘70s. When you wanted a toy back then, you had to either convince your grandma to take you to the local Toy Store. (Yes, there once was a thing called Toy Stores.) Or you had to save up enough allowance money and empty coke bottles to buy something from the back of your favorite comic book.
You could get X-Ray Specs, or Sea Monkeys, or a Pet Rock. Or even 6-foot-tall Monster Pin-ups. Full disclosure: I had them all.
These amazing items were delivered to you through the postal service. Remember that scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie is waiting for his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder ring?
Well, every day was like that when you were a kid in the ‘70s. The mail was your lifeline to the outside toy world. I would run to the mailbox as soon as I got home from school to see what the mailman had delivered that day. Mostly it was just catalogs and bills. But sometimes it would be a toy I had mail-ordered 6 weeks ago (a lifetime in Kid-dom).
Those days were the most glorious of all. Especially the day this little beauty arrived.
I could hardly wait to put my name on that line and claim my rightful place as an Official Star Warrior. That wonderful day, and the happy memories that it still sparks, would not have been possible without the Postal Service doing what it has always done. Delivering the stuff we need and the stuff we want. On time and without fail.
So to Postmaster General DeJoy, I say ‘stop denying happiness to kids all across this nation.’ If you don’t, I will revoke your membership in the Star Warrior fan club, effective immediately. Obviously I’m kidding. Ben Kenobi would have never approved your membership in the first place.
May The Postal Force Be With You!