Affirmative Action anything. If you do not like the way a particular business goes about its business, go elsewhere. Better yet, start your own. Either way, quit whining. Employing people to investigate this atomizing nation’s myriad hurt feelings was always a ridiculous proposition and only becomes more so with every million newcomers.

Any of the above, serving few, should be excised before a local post office, serving all.

A move is afoot to monetize everything currently taken for granted in America. Water, roads, and postal services are but a few. Try your aqua usage with Evian for a month and review the bill. Imagine the government treating your car like a taxicab and billing you for every few rotations on your odometer. Read the history of for-profit police and fire departments to realize how precarious your “rights” are. When the post office is foreclosed, how long before the Internet has a new “tax” per email? These are coming and some are already here.

Few have means to live as we do devoid of government subsidy for widely used resources. The object is degradation of First World standards of living. This has been the agenda over thirty years. The Great Global Equalization is coming, and it is as much about changing overall expectations as convincing us the post office is unnecessary.

Mailing a manila envelope weighing only 0.1 pounds from New York to Siberia (generally considered the other side of the world) takes approximately ten days and costs exactly $121.75 from UPS. FedEx quotes the same service at $125.78. DHL’s website gives no rate information, which one should always read as “expensive.” USPS, by contrast, charges only $29.95. Same package, same ETA, same service—only at a fourth of the price.

You only get one guess whether the private industry fee shall go up or down after the venture charging a quarter the amount of its competitors is pushed out of business. By the way, USPS also allows one to drop a postcard those 5,500-plus miles (8,900-plus kilometers) for only 98 cents. There is no such option with the private carriers, so you must add another $124 to the base sum.

For all its failing, sometimes government gets it right. These times are often overlooked because it is easier to scoff and buy into crackpot theories of the “privatization rationale” than to get off your assumptions and do your homework. Currently Americans enjoy some of the most astounding services ever created. One of these marvels reaches out to every nation and people on the globe no matter how distant or isolated. The benefit is eminently efficient, generally punctual, and incredibly inexpensive.

American citizens, largely due to their laziness, are on the verge of losing something which, once dismantled, stands almost no likelihood of being rebuilt. Should it be ruined we will have only ourselves to blame for this astounding lack of foresight. We will always have those booming numbers of crack-baby geniuses to set things right again, or perhaps we can email our Congressman to complain for the low, low fee of only a dollar per page.

Before it is too late, do yourself a favor: Gather up a few pennies, then send a postcard to someone you don’t know in Timbuktu or other points exotic. You’ll never have a better lark in your life for the money. Do it before the service is gone. Accomplishing such a minorly major geographic feat may be the sort of story which one day amazes your grandchildren.