Natural selection could nix Postal Service

The Borders bookstore chain crashed. Who could have foreseen that a few years ago?

A friend took me to a Borders in the Twin Cities once. It seemed like the epitome of culture. What a wondrous array of books, periodicals and CDs.

Today we are in the era of "creative destruction." Institutions and businesses can take little for granted now.

What wondrous new world are we being led into? It's a world where no one can take a staid approach.

Electronic communications level the playing field for everyone. It heightens natural selection in the business world.

Natural selection is not a pretty thing. "Jurassic Park" reminded us how a whole ecosystem got selected out. We learned how chaos theory can result in a seemingly well-ordered system breaking down.

I doubt we realize the full consequences of our digitized world. With analog systems breaking down all around us, lives are being disrupted, often in a tragic way.

The staid approach doesn't work for anything now. It's hard on middle age or older people who appreciated the old sense of order. We used rotary telephones and manual typewriters.
Writing longhand often seemed preferable to punching something out on a clunky typewriter. You'd write longhand to "write a letter."
But holy cow, the U.S. Postal Service looks now like it awaits the same fate as the dinosaur.

Aren't you getting weary seeing those fatalistic headlines every few months about the Postal Service? The bleak picture gets ever bleaker.

The mere reporting of this news would seem to make the situation worse. Now we're told the Postal Service could shut down due to financial woes. Heavens, it could happen before the end of next winter.

All these news articles end the same way: "Any changes (to how the Postal Service operates) are subject to approval by the U.S. Congress."

The Postal Service is desperate to throw off certain shackles. The government is responding with the kind of attentiveness and urgency one would associate with a tortoise, making me realize that Fareed Zakaria is probably right when he says the basic machinery of our government isn't suited for our new age. It's too cotton pickin' slow.

If in fact there is a solution for the Post Office woes, it should be implemented with not a moment to spare. Already many nervous individuals who depend on the Post Office for certain things are scrambling to identify contingencies.

People who have procrastinated on direct deposit will probably get off the shnide. My own family is an example of this.

The line on the graph will take a more extreme downward dip. Small towns that already have one foot in the grave will be dealt another blow if their P.O. closes.

It has been said the small-town Post Office offers intangibles. It's a tidy little building in town managed by a cheery, competent, uniformed individual. People kibitz there. Literature on government programs might be available there. Ditto tax forms.

But at its core, the P.O. is evidence of "life" in towns where increasingly the weeds are growing up from cracks in the sidewalks.

The school in Cyrus is supposedly in dire straits. Cyrus has already lost its cafe (a "kibitz" haven by definition). I spent 2-3 New Year's Eves dining in Cyrus alone. Actually I wasn't alone because I remember some of the other patrons who were there.

The cafe is empty. The school has vultures circling over it, and can the Post Office not be far behind?

Morris is increasingly an oasis. An oasis means "life" but you don't want to be too isolated. It's a little scary being isolated. What if the (economic) grim reaper slowly begins hovering over our community?

We have already lost some things of value. The old school property which 5-6 years ago was the focus of such grandiose visions - remember the "green community?" - sits deader than a doornail.

How steadfast is in fact our own Post Office? Might more and more activity be concentrated in Willmar? Why not? It's bigger, right? Everything is dictated by "the numbers," right?
It's natural selection which operates unabated if we allow it to.

"Progress" wiped out the small family farm and that was traumatic enough. Losing Post Offices will be dictated by "the numbers."

Newspapers are in rapid retreat and that doesn't bother me. The natural selection of the digitized world will have consequences that we're probably just starting to see. A futurist can have a field day.

A futurist might have predicted the demise of newspapers by now. Michael Wolff did. Nancy Barnes of our Star Tribune said recently the end of print is indeed coming. This was treated as somewhat of a bombshell by David Brauer of Minnpost. (David has been through a health issue recently and I certainly hope he's on the mend.)

Barnes sees print surviving for at least five more years. After that, all bets are apparently off.

If Barnes is right, we can expect a rapid further decline in print's viability. Because, print won't simply disappear if it gives all the appearances of being stable. It will disappear once it clearly has a stake in the heart and everyone has moved on to something else. Ironically it won't even be "news!"

Of course we're already moving on to alternatives. I have probably been a gadfly with people around Morris over the last five-plus years by saying we should grasp those alternatives now. What a wonderful experiment it would be if we could just say "to heck with our non-locally owned newspaper and just forget about it."

Seize the new media which is what "Stevens Forward!" wants us to do anyway.

"Stevens Forward!" recommends a "virtual community." We have all the tools to establish that now.

Old habits do drag on for a while.

Borders is gone and we just shrug. The U.S. Postal Service is entangled in an ugly transition and who knows how it will emerge.

Newspapers? Chuck 'em.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com