So, what should we make of the tow truck I saw today and the photos that are splashed across twitter and facebook of postal boxes stacked like Legos behind chain link fences? On the one hand, there is cause to worry. We know that the USPS has been reducing its workforce over the last decade, which disproportionately affects minorities, women, and veterans.[4] We have heard Trump claim that the Post Office will not be able to deliver election ballots in a reliable way, spawning fears that he will sabotage the USPS in order to prevent mail-in voting and undermine the legitimacy of the election.[5] We have also seen people like Larry Kudlow, who is the current Director of the United States National Economic Council and a man with no formal training in economics, declare openly that Republicans are not interested in defending “voting rights” for citizens. “That’s not our game,” he said cynically today. [6]  Indeed, if you wanted to stop populations from voting in the middle of a pandemic, your first step might be to undermine the postal service.

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the photos of the postbox graveyards are not what they appear to be. The photo evidently started as a post on Reddit, made its way to Twitter, got retweeted by some celebrities, and has become a standard cause of panic across the country. In truth, the photo is not of a graveyard, but of a refurbishing yard. And while some postboxes have been removed, that process started years ago when the quantity of delivered mail began to drop.

This moment may not say much about the real status of the Postal Service. But the fact that we are in such a panic over its precarious fate does say a lot about who we are as a nation right now.

In 1964, the philosopher and writer, Hannah Arendt, wrote in a letter to one of her detractors, “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,“ and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. That is its banality.”[7] Small acts that by themselves seem shallow and meaningless can accrue power over time. Right now, as thousands die, as racial injustice continues, and as the ability of citizens to cast their vote seems increasingly precarious, we are concerned that the banality of evil could overwhelm whatever aspirations to democracy we might still have.

Notes

[1] Jordan Weissmann and Aaron Mak, “How Much Should You Panic Over the U.S. Postal Service?,” Slate Magazine, August 22, 2020, https://slate.com/business/2020/08/usps-mail-slowdown-dejoy-trump-election.html.

[2] USPS, “Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Statement – Newsroom – About.Usps.Com,” August 18, 2020, https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/0818-postmaster-general-louis-dejoy-statement.htm.

[3] USPS, “A Decade of Facts and Figures,” Postal Facts – U.S. Postal Service, n.d., https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/.

[4] Drew Desilver and Katherine Schaeffer, “The State of the U.S. Postal Service in 8 Charts,” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/the-state-of-the-u-s-postal-service-in-8-charts/.

[5] Sam Levine, “Trump Admits He Is Undermining USPS to Make It Harder to Vote by Mail,” The Guardian, August 13, 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-post-office-election-funding.

[6] https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1293909535933964290?s=20

[7] Letter from Hannah Arendt to Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Dec. 12, 1964, The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, p. 5. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mharendt_pub&fileName=03/030170/030170page.db&recNum=36