USPS, WTF?
I moved four months ago. Being the good, law-abiding american citizen i am, i turned in my change of address form about a month early, and waited patiently for my mail with little yellow stickers to appear.
Four months later, it has not.
Traditionally, I have had zero faith in the US postal service. I’ve had gift-cards stolen en-route, international mail ripped open and its contents shredded (and then packed back into its ruined envelope), and I once had 5 months of backlogged, supposedly “forwarded” mail dumped, en masse, on my porch in one day. Maybe all mail doesn’t suck, but Atlanta’s certainly blows.
I’m about to move again. And my mail still hasn’t found me. So, I’m understandably worried.
This has gotten me thinking. We are coming to another presidential election in about a year, and I am very, very, very bad at doing my research and learning enough about the players to feel comfortable voting for anyone. Don’t ask me why - all incoming discourse of a political nature immediately turns to Cyrillic characters in my head, and I lose 60 IQ points. I just don’t have a mind for politics. But this time I’m going to try. And I’ve had, probably my first-ever meaningful political revelation. It goes something like this:
(In my experience) the US postal service is at best unreliable, at worst, bafflingly awful.
The US Postal service is run by the Government, solely.
Another very visible service run solely by the government is the US public school system.
That system is at best unreliable, and at worst, bafflingly awful.
The US public school system is, itself, a human-focused endeavor. It is meant to better society, build futures, etc.
Taking into account poor school conditions, insultingly low pay for instructors, and the sheer genius that is the “no child left behind plan,” I’d say it fails miserably at that task.
Universal healthcare, usually bandied about as a government-funded and run program, is on the docket for nearly every candidate.
Healthcare (especially for the young, the poor, and those of us not lucky enough to have benevolent employers who pay for such a luxury) is a necessarily human-focused endeavor.
1 broken, mis-managed, country-wide governmental system + 1 other broken, country-wide governmental system does not = a fantastic shot at creating a country-wide governmental system that actually works.
track record on the human-focused endeavors: very, very bad.
(I could add Medicare and the Social Security program to that list as well, but 3’s a great number to work with here.)
Here we come to my first politically-minded decision ever.
Capitalism is good. Private industry is often corrupt, but breeds competition and innovation, and therefore services that are more directly beholden to the almighty $$ power of the buying public. We demand with our wallets more efficiently than we demand with our slow-moving and decision-by-committee fists of bureaucracy.
So, anyone out there running for highest office in the land that can propose a workable, for-profit healthcare system that breeds advancement and availability of coverage for those who want it (and who aren’t rich or connected), you’ve got my vote.
And if you can fix the mail too, I might vote for you twice.
Forget the law-abiding thing.
