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]

Annette Gordon-Reed
@agordonreed
<https://twitter.com/agordonreed>
·
3h <https://twitter.com/agordonreed/status/1249186593807781894>
The Post Office was always embattled in the South because it was one of the
few places where black people could get jobs that were well-paying. Many
whites resented it because it was a way out of blacks working in service to
them for little pay.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 3:29 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
>