The Post Office is a public service that should treat every American fairly. Slowing delivery will hurt rural areas that rely on mail carriers to deliver goods, information, medications, and more.
Families across the country count on USPS, and for people like us who are from rural areas, the Postal Service is a lifeline. I grew up on a farm in rural Oklahoma. At home, the color of the mail Jeep mail may change across time, but the red dirt that covers them is the same, and the familiarity and reliability of the service. My co-author, Shawn, grew up in Iowa where the postal service was a lifeline to information, magazines, and contact with friends and family. USPS offers more than just nostalgia. Seniors, veterans, and others with limited mobility and disabilities rely on the post office for medications and benefits; small family farmers rely on the post office to deliver live chickens and bees for their hives, and hundreds of Indigenous communities across this country are primarily in rural areas. Small business owners rely on the postal service to ship goods to their customers because in addition to affordability, there is a physical location in most ZIP codes they can ship from. Increasingly, rural places are losing their hospitals and pharmacies, making prescriptions through the mail more essential. But private carriers like UPS and FedEx charge extra to deliver to some rural areas, if they deliver there at all.
