The PO is in trouble again. This, from 2013, is part of the meaning of The Crying of Lot 49, imho. When the US started losing its unitedness.

[Mark Kohut]

>From the moment Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster
general in 1775, the purpose of the post office has always been to bind the
nation together. It was a way of unifying thirteen disparate colonies so
that the abolitionist in Philadelphia had access to the same information
and newspapers as the slaveholder in Augusta, Georgia.

Today the postal service has a network that stretches across America: 461
distribution centers, 32,000 post offices, and 213,000 vehicles, the
largest civilian fleet in the world. Trucks carrying mail log 1.2 billion
miles a year. The postal service handles almost half of the entire planet's
mail. It can physically connect any American to any other American in 3.7
million square miles of territory in a few days, often overnight: a vast
lattice of veins and arteries and capillaries designed to circulate the
American lifeblood of commerce and information and human contact.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a18228/post-office-business-trouble-0213/