I wrote about crimes against postal carriers in my Sunday column, under the headline, “Attention, bad guys, leave our postal carriers alone,” because, as Rep. Kweisi Mfume says, for most of the baby boomer lifetime, robbing the mailman has not been a thing. There are certain people you just don’t mess with, and the crime rate against letter carriers is really distressing. They are targets largely because the US Postal Service is yet to modernize security of street collection boxes. The column explains.
There are good reasons why polls show the vast majority of Americans love the USPS. Some are simply matters of necessity, efficiency and commerce. But there’s something else, and it stems from the experience of receiving a personal letter or something else of special meaning, and getting it hand-delivered from the uniformed men and women who walk and drive through our neighborhoods or stop by our businesses five and six days a week.
How many times have we seen postal carriers like the affable Reggie Herring (above), an Army veteran who has been with the USPS for 30 years, sweating through summer afternoons in the Baltimore humidity? How many have we seen, hooded up for a snowstorm, trudging to the front door with their satchels? It might seem that we take them for granted, but actually, as weather becomes more extreme, the more we appreciate letter carriers. What they do daily across this land approaches something like a miracle. So, yeah. As they say in Bawlmer, Merlin: “Leave ’em A-lone.”
Dan Rodricks 