LITTLE ROCK — THE LIST is long and ominous, like a death warrant for thousands of small towns: Carthage. Casscoe. Columbus. Evansville. Knobel. Montrose. New Hope. Rosston. St. Paul. Turrell, Washington. Witts Springs . . . .
Those are just some of the 179 post offices in Arkansas that the U.S. Postal “Service” has considered closing in order to pare its budget in this internetted age as snail mail becomes a thing of the past, and with it the sense of community post offices gave Arkansas’ littlest towns. These towns got a reprieve, but it may be only temporary.
The post offices/community centers in Alicia, Caldwell, Driver, Johnson City, Pineville and Rivervale are already gone. Peach Orchard’s is due to shut down December 4th.
It’s enough to make you wonder which will prove the Last of the Mohicans as one post office after another closes all across rural America. There are 3,653 on the list of endangered post offices nationwide, and each represents a disappearing way of life.
Why kill them off? Because the U.S. Postal Service continues to lose money (it ran $3.1 billion in the red through the third quarter of this year) and here’s another way to economize. That it means sacrificing the soul of rural America doesn’t seem to matter; how enter the value of a soul on the balance sheet?
EVERYBODY knows, or should, that the national debt is swallowing the country’s fiscal future. A supercommittee of Congress is working on the problem, or maybe not working on it, as we go to press. It’s so much easier for Congress to hand off its responsibility to a committee than actually solve it. It’s a little like passing a Balanced Budget amendment instead of actually balancing the federal budget.
Now the Postal Service proposes to pass the buck for its fiscal problems to America’s littlest towns. Volunteer the Alicias and Carthages, the Rosstons and Rivervales for the chopping block. We have nothing to lose but our rural souls.
Just what is it that will be lost? Consider the role of the post office in Rosston: “It’s where we get our information,” says Tony Ellis, who manages the town’s water department. “If you wanted to know something, you’d go there.” The bulletin board of a smalltown post office is crammed full of notices, schedules, ads, appeals, church drives, lost-and-founds. . . . These little post offices perform the role the town crier did in medieval times.
But they offer more than a strictly utilitarian service. “If you take away our post office,” to quote Eddie Dunnigan over at Black Oak, “you take away our identity.”
And more. A town as small as Black Oak, Ark., (Pop. 286) can feel more like a family. And what happens when the family has no place to gather on a routine basis, like when people pick up their mail?
“We don’t get to see people out in our community,” Rachelle Hickman told the Postal Service’s representative at a hearing that sounded like more of a wake. “You always see a friendly face at the post office. It’s not right doing this to our small town. We love each other. We are family.” Behind every one of these closings, there are real people who need more than just a place to pick up the mail; they need each other.
OF COURSE the Postal Service, like so many other federal agencies, needs to cut back. And adjust to hard times-and these changed times. One of the folks at the hearing in Black Oak said he’d emailed his U.S. senator, Mark Pryor, urging him to help save the post office. Yes, emailed him. Which explains why the post offices are in trouble as the internet takes the place of the postman.
But there are other, better and bigger cuts the Postal Service can make without cutting out rural America’s heart. Every time someone protests the loss of a government service, he ought to have to suggest a different way the savings could be made. Wanting government services but not wanting to pay for them is largely how we got in this current mess. (Again, see Congress.) Want to save the Rosstons of the country? Then tell us how the Postal Service can economize some other way.
Here’s one way: Instead of passing the bill, financial and emotional, on to small-town America, why not eliminate a really big expense that affects all of us, and not just every little crossroads town? Cut out Saturday mail delivery. Couldn’t we all live an extra day without finding our mailboxes jammed full of the junk mail that makes the bills and the letter from Aunt Martha so hard to find?
That’s our thought on the matter. It may not be as indignant as Eddie Dunnigan’s or as tearful as Ms. Hickman’s, but it’s an alternative to what has become a common phenomenon on the American scene: the disappearing post office.
How many more lost city folk looking for directions have to be told to turn left “where the post office used to be” before all of us realize that not just motorists may lose their way? Sometimes a whole country can. As when it loses touch with its small-town roots.
Editorial, Pages 20 on 11/19/2011