Death of the mailman?
Threat to iconic U.S. Postal Service is bad news for Americana

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OK, so the milkman doesn't come to our back porch anymore. Door-to-door salesmen are practically extinct (though door-to-door religious proselytizers remain plentiful).

Yet now comes word that the postman may abandon his appointed rounds - and not because of rain or snow or heat or gloom of night. According to an Associated Press story last week, the steadily rising costs of moving the mail have the U.S. Postal Service pondering major changes.

There is talk of reducing the number of days the mail is delivered from six to four or even one. There are suggestions of eliminating home delivery in favor of customer pickup at central locations. There is discussion of outsourcing some delivery areas to private companies.

Call me an alarmist, but none of this sounds good. Any blow to the U.S. Postal Service is a blow to the fiber of America.

Mail carriers are our civilian men and women in blue. They are the source of comforting ritual (“Honey, is the mail here yet?"). They are a rock of tradition in a world of shifting sands.

Once you knew your mail carriers so well that you called them by name and gave them a gift at Christmas. Once upon a time in Tallahassee, the postal carriers brought mail twice a day - and all the news they were talking about downtown.

Now the idea that they will be only occasional visitors, if not disappear entirely, is unsettling.

I'll grant you the need for daily mail delivery may be diminishing. The mailbox at our house used to be stuffed to overflowing every day. (I once spent several weeks shopping for one of those giant mailboxes that could hold packages. Then I realized I'd have to dig a big hole and mix concrete and use a level. The heck with it, I said: Let it overflow.)

But our mail delivery has grown thinner in recent months. A few bills, a couple of fliers, the occasional greeting card. It may be the harbinger of a changing world of mail, in which catalogs, credit-card applications and other junk mail disappear into the online vortex. We won't know for sure until election season.

What will happen to our metaphors? Will no one go postal? Will teenagers no longer play post office? Will movie titles such as "The Postman Always Rings Twice" lose their meaning?

What will happen to stamp collecting? What will we do with all those mailboxes that line our streets? Will Karl Malone go into the Basketball Hall of Fame without his nickname?

The idea that I'm going to have to go to some strip mall to pick up my mail may be progress. But it's not American.

Frankly, one of the most disheartening developments would be transferring mail delivery to private carriers - another form of government privatization that denudes tradition and transfers higher costs to consumers.

Certainly, there is something to be said for the benefits of private business competition. Fed-Ex does show up every day before noon. UPS drivers hustle packages deep into the night.

But you pay dearly for such service. I find it a little pricey to pay $11 to ship a letter by UPS or Fed-Ex. There isn't a lot of mail in my life that absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.

To me, there is no greater bargain than the first-class letter sent through the U.S. Postal Service. For 41 cents, your card to Grandma travels 3,000 miles in a couple of days. And the service is incredibly reliable. In my entire life, I know of only one letter of mine that was not delivered. And that was to the IRS. It didn't break my heart that I had to send it again.

I know it's a changing world. I know the cost of everything is going up.

But if we can't save the U.S. Postal Service, we've got big problems