This commercial begins by saying that a refrigerator has never been hacked, and that a cork board has never been infected with an online virus. That may be true, but real life people have stolen mail from other real life people and stolen their real life identities. So this argument isn’t that great. Plus, refrigerators get raided all the time! And people get viruses too, not just computers! And mentioning that idea in an ad for the post office might not be the best idea: Remember when someone mailed that anthrax to Senator Tom Daschle? I had totally forgotten about; but now, thanks to this ad, I remember it again.
But I love the US Post Office: no kidding! When Republicans attack the US Post Office as a model of inefficiency, I can only think about how they always get me my letters in two days from 3,000 miles away without fail, and that seems pretty darn efficient to me. Maybe they’re not efficient with money, but they do a really good job, most of the time! (Okay, so maybe I get someone else’s letter once in a while, but that’s just normal human error that could happen in any other activity.)
But this idea of being safer than the internet, I just don’t know that it’s true. I think a better thing to say would be that an email doesn’t have your handwriting, or perfume on it, and that you can’t send a real solid item from your hands to someone else’s through the internet. So keep that personal touch, by sending things through the post office. (I think some congresswoman made this point before and got laughed at for it? But it’s still a good idea anyway. But I don’t know that it’s enough of a reason to get people to send stuff through the mail.) But hey: the post office’s slogan could always say this: “Go Postal, or else we will!” That way, maybe they could scare us into mailing letters.
But you know, I want the post office to keep on doing what it’s been doing all my life: reliably delivering letters on time to whoever I want to send them to (and whoever wants to send them to me)! And besides, wasn’t it the US Post Office that proved Santa Claus was real in Miracle on 34th Street? So then shouldn’t it be the Godless heathen Democrats attacking the US Post Office, rather than the religious-right-leaning Republicans? I’m getting confused as to what shameless pandering should apply here…
Anyway, here’s the letter carrier commercial I’m talking about:
