Letters to the editor for March 30

Postal Service elegy

“Brown paper packages tied up with string..” 

I used to be pretty good at knotting string around a package so that I’d have four corners of it with a place for the address right smack in the middle. 

Do you remember standing in line at the post office watching the Christmas gifts going and coming. You could count on running into someone you knew and perhaps hadn’t seen in a long time. You’d exchange a Christmas greeting and share a sense of generosity. The post office was part of the season. 

You could count on the post office to protect and deliver your mail safely, after all it was illegal to mess with the mail. 

You could count on your delivery person to say hello and exchange bets on the weather. 

The Postal Service represented America and its history. 

But, the president, during his first run in the office, appointed a postmaster general who decimated the postal service. He removed the neighborhood and shopping area drop boxes and began a process of ruin.  Somewhere between then and now, the practice of hiring military veterans was sidelined and the once kindly clerks that you knew at the post office dwindled. My local post office, now steeped in dullness, hasn’t answered their telephone for months. 

To what purpose? Greed? Ignorance?   

Kindness costs nothing. 

Yes, the world has moved deeply into insensitive immediacy. A world of 5G and space junk. Snail mail is now a sad joke. E-cards were popular for a while and competitive mailing providers offered what the USPS didn’t in terms of brighter, kinder and more effective service. 

Is there an answer? Or is it sadly, the end of an era. How do you replace the feeling of opening a greeting card that has reached you across the miles. 

— Cynthia Winters, Whitefish 

Defend veterans

If Jon Tester was still in office he would have fought to stop the layoff of thousands of employees at the Veterans Administration, and the striking of names of Black and female veterans from the Arlington National Cemetery roster. 

When Sen. Tim Sheehy and Rep. Ryan Zinke ran for office, they touted the fact that they were ex-Navy SEAL warriors.  Well then, stand up and fight for your fellow veterans and the Veterans Administration. 

Removing links about Black and female veterans from the Arlington National Cemetery website is just pure racist and misogynistic on the part of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. 

Please contact your representatives and senators and request a stop to this nonsense of gutting our federal agencies.

— Mike Lauman, Kalispell