Return Post Office to Cabinet

Well, here we go again. The price of mailing a letter is about to go up from 41 cents to 42 cents, and it seems like it was no more than a few weeks ago since it jumped from 39 cents to where it is now.

Most of the hue and cry over soaring postal rates comes, understandably, from the publishers of magazines and newspapers who must pass along to their already unhappy subscribers their increased mailing costs.

Surely the publishers and their trade associations can work to get a satisfactory solution out of FedEx or UPS or some brand new magazine mailing service founded by the publishers themselves.

But what about us, the poor ordinary citizens, who just have to suck it up and, more and more often, set aside the desire to write frequent letters to lonely Aunt Martha in the nursing home, or to rekindle a relationship with our old college roommate.

As a retired Episcopal priest, my annual Christmas card list is huge, and I have so enjoyed that once-a-year contact with dear old friends from the several parishes I served throughout a long career. But postal rate increases in recent years, coming with the reduced financial resources of retirement, have just about priced me out of this happy activity.

I also have had a lot of fun and won a lot of good stuff through my hobby of entering sweepstakes, by sending in numerous 3 by 5 cards bearing my name and address and phone number. This, too, is being priced out of existence for me.

A long time ago, when my great grandfather, William Lyne Wilson, was Postmaster General in President Grover Cleveland's Cabinet, it only cost 3 cents to mail a letter anywhere in the country. Of course things were cheaper back then, but even then, I doubt if the business of carrying the mail paid for itself. It wasn't supposed to.

Whether one is a conservative or a liberal, one gives lip service to the notion that our government should do for us only those things that we cannot do for ourselves. Delivering our mail was paramount among "those things."

Can we not go back to the day when the Post Office Department was a Cabinet-level part of our government and when delivering our letters was paid for by our taxes and moderately priced stamps?

Perhaps if we stopped building bridges to nowhere, and stayed out of multi-billion dollar wars that we have no real reason to be in, we could handle this.

THE REV. BERT H. HATCH

Fort Street

Edisto Island