Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

There is an actual route in Arizona that delivers to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, by burro. Do you think the USPS makes money on these customers? Profit is irrelevant. The law says your mail gets delivered.

Real hate requires either psychological distance or inescapable intimacy. In the worst of all cases, it combines both. Here we are, all of us stuck in the same country, inescapably intimate with the fellow citizens of our shared republic. Here we are, all of us sorted into groups where we hold each other at arm’s length, naked with uninformed disgust. I’ve always found hate alarmingly easy to access, a physical experience that comes from inside us. Hate justifies violence and inspires violent action. Hate immediately divides people into the hater and the hated. Hate does not recognize institutions, except to hate them too. Hate sees only groups and individuals, never systems; history only has value as a pretext for more hate.