Letter to the Editor

Bring back the pony express

Monday, July 29, 2024

Dear Editor,

“The Pony Express route was nearly 2,000 miles long overland, from Ste. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento California, had about 190 stations (mostly in Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada), and required about 10 days to cover. Each rider generally rode 75 to 100 miles and changed horses every 10 to 15 miles. The service (used mainly by newspapers and businesses) was remarkably efficient—during its 18 months, only one bag of mail was reported lost. … It ceased with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph system. … The first ride of the Pony Express, on April 3, 1860, was reported by newspapers across the country. … Forty riders participated in the Express’s first sprint … which ended in downtown Sacramento at 5:45 PM on April 13; exactly 10 days after the first rider had left St. Joseph. … During its 18 months of operation, the Pony Express made a total of 308 complete runs, covering about 616,000 miles. … It delivered 34,753 letters … The primary failure of the Pony Express had been its inability to make a profit. Its founders’ ability to assemble and operate this remarkable service under especially challenging circumstances was a tribute to their courage and ingenuity.” – Encyclopedia Britannica.

Compare the Pony Express 10-day delivery schedule to the odyssey our mail takes via the U.S. Postal Service, which by way of airplanes, trucks, cars, and on-foot carriers, requires 14 days to deliver a First-Class letter from Dallas, TX to Stratton, Neb. This assumes your mail arrives at all. Too often, mail ends up in Timbuktu or else is lost in “the system.” I’ve stopped counting of the times a bill arrives the day before the payment is due – or else arrives several days after! Sending mail through the entrenched bureaucratic machinery of the USPS is like playing chicken with a black hole – if your mail falls in, nothing escapes. The incompetence consumes all.

You may not even have the satisfaction of knowing the date your mail entered “the system.” The latest SNAFU omits the cancellation stamp; so the date a piece of mail was processed remains a mystery, and thus fault cannot be determined – Post Office or Sender? What excuse is given for this handy glitch? “It was equipment failure.” Perhaps if the governing board of the U.S. Postal Service would apply funds to proper maintenance, rather than wasting three billion dollars on the purchase of 66,000 electric vehicles by 2026 (Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act), they might competently perform their primary mission of delivering the mail on time and to the correct address. But instead of doing their essential job, their first priority is now becoming “carbon neutral” by 2030.

However, the reason for the Postal Service’s poor performance in fulfilling its basic mission is a practice more idiotic than its misguided expenditures to pursue the conceited folly of “saving the planet:” You live in Stratton and mail a letter to your neighbor or a Stratton business. You affix a First-Class stamp and deposit your letter at the Stratton Post Office. Does the clerk place the letter in the addressee’s PO Box or in a bin for local delivery? Nay-nay! That would be sensible! That would save money – but our federal government has never cared much for saving money. Rather, your letter is trucked 34 miles to the McCook Post Office, which then trucks it 69 miles to North Platte – where your letter gets “sorted.” Then the North Platte PO trucks your letter back to McCook, where it then gets trucked to Stratton, and hopefully delivered to your neighbor on the other side of town. This level of “efficiency” is SOP when the government holds a monopoly on mail delivery …

AND THAT IS WHY A FIRST-CLASS POSTAGE STAMP NOW COSTS YOU SEVENTY-THREE CENTS!

I guess the latest rate increase came about so that the U.S. Postal Service may use electric vehicles to deliver my mail to the wrong address or otherwise lose it in a more environmentally friendly way. But, not to be outdone, these tone-deaf dimwits plan to move the “sorting” center from North Platte to Denver. That should workout about as well as Kamala Ha-Ha Harris being Biden’s “Border Czar.” There’s no stupid like government stupid.

Bring back the Pony Express – at least it delivered the mail on time and to the right address.