You missed the announcement: Kalorama Station, your first love of District post offices, has been spared. After months of fighting, it has been removed from the closure list. Victory can be claimed by you and your neighbors, whom you were told sent more than 2,000 notes to Washington, D.C. Postmaster Gerald Roane. The facility at 14 and T Streets NW, which was slated to be closed because it lost its lease, also may have been saved. The people united can never be defeated, you shout, taking yourself back momentarily to your community organizing days.
“[Those] post offices are just too important to lose,” D.C. Councilman Jim Graham said, adding that he’s working with Roane to identify a government building–possibly the Reeves Municipal Center–where the T Street facility could be relocated.
The importance of the Kalorama Station was never in doubt. There always was a steady of customers. And, as you pointed out to postal service managers, the influx of new residents to the Adams Morgan area could only mean more folks using the facility, if a decent marketing strategy were developed.
“Now we have removed eight off the list,” D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a written statement. “What’s more, no closings will occur until after May because the Postal Service, in response to members of Congress, has agreed to postpone all closures until then.”
While there has been tangible evidence the postal service has been mismanaged, Congress hasn’t done the quasi-public system any favors. It demanded it prepay certain benefits. That requirement plunged the system deeper into debt.
But the real problem is that senior postal officials have yet to devise a plan to help it effectively compete in the age of emails and iPads. So, the battle is not over.
“Intimate talking, the social call of humans, is on the endangered behavior list,” John Locke lamented in his book “Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore: The De-Voicing of Society.”
“Many of us are beginning to develop the symptoms of an undiagnosed social condition, a kind of functional ‘de-voicing’ brought on by an insufficient diet of intimate talking.”
He undoubtedly was decrying society’s exchange of real face-to-face conversations for those dastardly text messages, emails written in undecipherable language, electronic invitations that frequently lack personality or warmth and those 140 character tweets. The world of communication has become an abbreviated, short-circuited mess.
It will not be enough, you think, to save one or two post offices–or even eight. There should be a campaign that reminds folks of the unique role of the postal service in American culture. Perhaps an image of a soldier reading a letter from a girlfriend he had to leave behind. Sure there is Skype. But when there is no wireless, dial-up connection, there is always the letter– there to be read and reread.
Can digital technology ever deliver that kind of intimate pleasure?
jonetta rose barras can be reached at [email protected]
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
