Throw mud on the wall to see if it sticks. An idiom defined as: offer an idea or strategy to see if 51% of Americans agree.

The US Postal Service is over 240 years old. It employees more than 600,000 folk–third highest employer behind the federal government and Walmart.  Its fleet size is in excess of 250,000 vehicles. Further during the holiday season, it delivers almost 1 BILLION packages.  Yet, petty politics has blocked its funding to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in election ballots.  In Arizona, mail-in ballots have worked successfully for years; I should know I’ve been on the ballot five times.

I choose not to debate the mail-in ballot issue.  I’ve far greater concerns, such as the economic impact on the automotive industry, the postal work force, and the greeting card industry.  Admittedly I pay several monthly expense bills on-line, but NOT utilities.  I have learned the hard way that internet/cable service, electricity, and water bills surreptitiously increase if I don’t pay attention.

As a quasi-historian, without documentation, most family history is lost.  As any competent researcher knows the value of primary sources vs. secondary sources,  Primary sources are those eyewitness accounts and/or photos, original literary works, speeches, and historical documents.  People don’t write letters anymore, for the internet has rendered it obsolete.  Much of our understanding of US history is from letters delivered by the postal service:  the Civil War, WWI and WWII, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam war.

Many of us waited for the postman to bring the Sears and other Christmas catalogs, by mid-December our dog-eared catalog was falling apart. Call me old-fashioned, but I love Christmas and birthday cards.  I delight in handwritten thank-you notes.  I cherish my grandmother’s diaries and my father’s letters to his parents during his freshman year.  (A poor country boy dropped into Ohio State University in 1940.) Being a pack rat, I reminisce not only over picture albums, but of every card, picture, and note my kids gave to me.

To this day, the post office continues delivery home-made, care packages to our college students and to our men and women serving overseas.  But yet, mud-slinging has threatened the destruction of one of America’s oldest institutions.

Believe me, on November 3rd, I’ll shred my mail-in ballot and vote in person.  (No one can challenge my birther-right; my family moved to here prior to the American Revolution.) I will not be disenfranchised by cheap muddy rhetoric, nor petty politics.

Pile of Vote Badges – US Elections Concept Image