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September 2 - September 13, 2025
Yeah, yeah, the VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It’s one thing to use that term in a PowerPoint presentation about consumer attitudes, but something else to be feeling it down in your guts. The whole world was now Fuck City. What the fuck was I going to do?
An adult mind can hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts at once. Because they don’t actually contradict each other.
Patriotism is not an old-fashioned value, but rather an old value, a foundational one. It is the virtue of critical loyalty, the ability to feel deep affection for one’s country and a simultaneous willingness to critique its failures.
felt very contemporary to the Founders. They wanted to establish a government that would be answerable to critique, that would evolve and respond to the new needs of a changing world.
The country has always had shortcomings, injustices, and yes, even sins. But we must find a way to continue as a liberal society of laws, where we provide the most freedom to the most people but also protect the different and weaker among us. There has to be a starting point. It is love of country.
The Oath of Office is a sacred trust, a form of prayer—a prayer for the Constitution, a prayer for America and her people. But there is no unearned grace. For the prayer to mean anything, America has to be acted out. Nature’s God endowed us all with inalienable rights. We were all created equal. It takes institutions like the Postal Service to make that statement come true.
if all you had to do as a carrier was deliver the mail, working as a letter carrier would be one of the greatest jobs in the world. But the fact is that every day, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck, and then disassembles that library in route order.
Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.
That is the other difference between a regular and a sub. The sub just delivers the mail. The regular is delivering something else. Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff that a government is supposed to do for its people.
Sometimes winning is the act of not losing. But there was more than that here. I was being shown something: all that was required of me was not quitting.
Maybe that was the thing holding me back, some internalized norm of how my brain was supposed to work that simply wasn’t doing it for me any longer, a task-oriented spotlight of intellectualization that kept trying to turn this job, this moment, into a management consultancy exercise, Mr. Systems Thinking, when really all I needed to do was deliver the fucking mail.
Amazon is ruthless. A behemoth that ate Sears and Kmart for snacks. A publicly traded Frankenstein creature, shocked into life by vast flows of data, animated by its robot-staffed misery factories, where the humans trapped inside are stuck in a John Henry race they are never going to win, their every movement tracked to the second in an eternal time-motion study, the workplace as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s mutant brainchild.
When you chase down your letter carrier and say, “Wait a minute, Mr. Postman!” and jam a get-well card you handwrote to Grandma into my hand, correctly addressed and with a Forever stamp in the upper-right-hand corner, guess what? I have to take your letter. I work for you, the American people. Congress has not only authorized me to carry that letter but has obliged me to take it, to carry it in trust and under the legal protection of the federal government and deliver it wherever it is supposed to go. If Granny lived in a Zuni cave dwelling at the bottom of a canyon in the Four Corners area,
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This world we’ve built for ourselves is complex to the point of being paralyzing. Then we wonder why people feel hopeless and angry. They know all these systems are pushing them around, even if they aren’t sure how. I have been complicit in this expert-powered world, and I did it for the same reason everyone does—because I’ve been in management and now I’ve been on the front lines, and let me tell you, things are a hell of a lot more comfortable in management.
Sometimes the heroic act is simply showing up.
The Post Office was coming. You are not alone.
I came to believe that the American people hold a collective memory of a time where news of the outside world was carried on the back of a lone man or woman who was authorized by the people’s government to travel on foot up mountains and across creeks to deliver not just the mail but a reality that must be believed in to exist.
Reminding us that we are a people, that our job is to love and protect each other, that our government at its best is us, and that when we are alone, we are still together, joined by ideas, history, correspond...
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“Here, take a look.” He began to hand me the rifle, then stopped himself. “You’re not a felon or anything, are you?” “I’m a sworn federal employee in a position of trust.” “Oh yeah, right! Of course. Yeah, man, check it out.” Of course you just hand a rifle to the mailman in your driveway. And of course I just took it. He pulled the
I had a recurring daydream of delivering the mail with Barack Obama. We would talk books and history and economics. But mostly we would talk about the fate of the nation. “I just don’t know how we make it through this, Mr. President.” “It’s just you and me and the mail, Steve. Please just call me Barack.”
I carried the US flag on my sleeve. I was never able to forget that I represented the US government for most folks during that dark time. I was the one person from the federal government who came to their home, who showed up with bills and pills and hair gel and ballots, the guy who embodied everything wrong and everything right with a constitutional republic.
When it all felt like a pointless performance, when people yelled at me, when I was accosted by the naked and insane, when I was greeted with indifference, or delight and kindness—it wasn’t me. It was the things I carried for them.
The trust we have been given by the citizenry we serve strengthens the efforts to maintain that trust. It’s the endowment effect—as postal workers we’ve been given something invaluable, so we work to protect it. There is a great danger in insulting the integrity of a group of hardworking people who are motivated by more than a just a paycheck. It is corrosive to the machinery of democracy.
Sixty-five million votes were cast by mail in the 2020 general election. There were fewer than five hundred cases of voter fraud nationally, mostly consisting of people attempting to vote with a dead relative’s mail-in ballot or double dippers attempting to vote with a mail-in ballot and then
vote again in person. There was one letter carrier in New Jersey who was caught dumping ballots before they were delivered to voters for use, a pro-Trump carrier who wanted to prevent ballots he saw as likely Biden votes from being c...
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Republican red, Democrat blue—at the end of the day we were all postal blue. The mail always came first. When you work with people, when you get to know them as people, it becomes much harder to hate them, at least for 99 percent of folks. And that remaining 1 percent is hateable entirely on their own human merits.
During the cleanup after the shootings, somebody stole Dad’s inner-ear display. It only lives on in my memory. Like that sense of safety that comes from living in a middle-class college town, in a country with a functioning democracy and the rule of law. A bubble of safety, and just as ephemeral as a bubble. One perturbation and in a blink it’s gone.
I racked the slide and jacked a big 230-grain Speer Gold Dot JHP round into the chamber, flipped on the safety, and stuffed the pistol down the front of my pants, cocked and locked. And I felt better. That’s what guns do. They don’t make you safer. They make you feel better. Until they don’t.
Because while guns absolutely function as an emotional prop, it doesn’t change the fact that the holes they blow in people are very physically real.
They are carried by people who have incomplete knowledge of a situation, who can’t see in the dark, who can’t discern the difference between a teenager with a bag of Skittles or a hardened criminal with a handgun.
when you introduce a gun, you instantly go from a zero percent chance of someone having a hole in their guts, their lungs, their brain pan to a nonzero chance.
It feels like turning the world into the Wild West, and everyone seems to forget that in Dodge City, Kansas, guns were banned inside the town limits in 1878, by American hero Wyatt Earp, because too many people were getting killed.
Except that the US Postal Service only kills a couple of carriers a year, and the Second Amendment kills forty-five thousand Americans. Do we still need them both? The question is immaterial, because by the Founders’ design, one hundred years from now there will still be a Postal Service, and there will still be guns in American hands.
Do you know what happens in the Postal Service when you have to pepper-spray a customer’s dog? Nothing. You’re a federal agent! Interfering with the delivery of the mail is a federal crime!
For me, during my time as a letter carrier, other than ballots, books were the most important thing I delivered.
This country is full of people who would love to get rid of books and get rid of the Postal Service. Illiberalism—and I’m not just talking about from one side of the political spectrum—operates from the notion that ideas are dangerous. No shit. So are antibiotics, electricity, jet engines, chain saws, and the internet.
Book bans and attacks on the Postal Service are nothing less than direct attacks on the founding documents of our constitutional republic, no different than the storming of the Capitol by an illiberal mob of cosplay fascist “patriots.” It’s just that attacking the post office doesn’t look as exciting on TV.
The Jesuits believe that it’s the Lord’s work to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and, perhaps most importantly, break the bondage of ignorance through education. They believe that every word you write is a blow that strikes the devil. Every book I delivered did the same.
When I was casing mail the next morning, I mentioned how hard it was starting out as a carrier and Kathy said, “Honey, I think I cried every day for three months.” It was hard for me to imagine her crying over anything. But the truth was, even once you graduated to the rescue party, you still had days you cried. It was the sticking around that mattered.
“This is intolerable! I won’t be treated this way! Don’t patronize me! ‘I’m just the substitute.’ ” That last part was said in a mocking singsong tone. She stormed off, up her driveway, her husband following her back toward their big glass house. About fifty yards away she turned to shout, “TAKE RESPONSIBILITY!”
The tone, that was the thing. The high-hat classist talking-down-to, as though I was stupid. Not a human, but a mailman. Something for a dog to bite, a punch line. And so she spat out words that tore into me, pulling me down to the ground. Words to make me hurt. To make me small. What I would have liked to do is take my pepper spray and give it to her right in the eyes. I’ve thought many times over the years since about how good it would have felt to send a long jet of caustic chemicals into the mucosa of her nose and listen to her howl.
I’ve been scuba diving in a rock quarry in the dead of the North Carolina winter, and I was never as cold as I was delivering the mail.
the fact that our government sends rural carriers out into the heat and the cold with nothing but warnings to drink water and stay warm is criminal. I don’t mean this rhetorically. Carriers die every summer from the heat. What the USPS needs is a sponsorship from Patagonia and Carhartt. Carriers deserve tough, technical gear that is right for the job, made in America.
Working outside with the mail, I felt close to the land, the weather, to my own material person. I wasn’t just a brain in a jar. I could scramble hills, dodge dogs, deliver the mail in the dark of night and the noonday sun. My body could do it all. Sometimes, looking out over the valley and eating a 7-Eleven sandwich, I would be struck with how fucking good it was, to be outside eating a sandwich. To be hungry, have something to eat, and then feel full. To be in the rain and have a really good set of raingear,
to just laugh at the weather and be part of it. It was so good to be flesh and blood, and know it.
To be present in time, in your own body, your spirit intact, your selfhood whole, it is a gift—and it will not last.
One of the things I loved most about being a mailman was the chance to do a good turn daily. Customers always thanked you when you did something extra, which kept me looking for other chances to help my customers, except for the assholes. If you think your letter carrier isn’t keeping a list of who’s naughty and nice, you are not living in reality. And letter carriers talk. If you are mean to one of them, we’re all going to know. So saying thank you is in your enlightened self-interest. But it’s more than that, because while getting thanked feels good, saying it is vital. Transacting makes you
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On a cold day, if you had boiled an old sock filled up with Folgers in a hubcap I would drink it and thank you for it.
Because when you are given something valuable that you don’t deserve, that’s called grace.
To all the mail handlers, the clerks, the city carriers, and most of all my brother and sister rural carriers, I want to thank you for every day you do your vital job. It does not go unseen. We see you and we love you. Thank you for your service.
