The COVID Letters

These thoughts were written by Gabe, one of our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

There’s always something in the way, isn’t there?

Never does it seem possible to just communicate with someone. I mean this in the most physical way possible too. There are innumerable psychological or sociological threads that could prevent people from communicating, and that’s terrible, and they should be dealt with, but the physical action of communicating suffers its own obstacles.

I’ve been distinctly away from the people I love since I left for college. I go to school 500 miles from my home, the closest person some 300 miles away. I picked that school in part because of how far away it was from everything. I needed and wanted to leave St. Louis, if even for the briefest of moments.

It was harder than expected. Not because of the distance from home (though it certainly didn’t help), but because of the distance from my friends, from the ones that I love.

And why wouldn’t it be? In high school, my friends and I worked together in fiery bursts of enthusiasm that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Now, the whole world sits between us, and I want to blow it up—or do something—to make it move. I stand at the mouth of the divide and I just gaze into its abyss. It rolls forever.

I want to move through it, and I want to meet my friends on the other side, and I can’t. The hundreds and hundreds of miles that laid between us replaced by an imperceptible specter that’s haunting the nation in ways that few things do.

I’m young; I’m in good health; there’s little doubt in my mind that I would turn out perfectly fine if I caught COVID-19; and it’s because of that I can’t do anything. I could meet up with my friends every weekend, every day—I certainly have the time to do it—and I would be healthy, and they would be healthy too. And if I did that, I would put far too many people at risk. People who may not be as healthy as I am, as young as I am. I can’t do that to them.

So, I mind the gap, look out into the oceans that linger between my friends and me, smaller than it’s been in months and still infinite in its width.

And now I need to ferry a message from one side to the other.

Well, if you can’t go forward, might as well take a step back.

Allegedly, mail is dying. In the abstract, it makes sense, I suppose. We aren’t cavemen; we have technology. Instant communication! Texting! Phone calls! It’s all the joy of having someone next to you while they’re a world away. It’s brilliant! It’s the best we have ever had!

So why isn’t it enough?

I talk to my friends every day. There’s always something to discuss, and I’m forever thankful we have access to technology that lets us discuss that whatever immediately, but something’s missing.

There’s always something in the way, isn’t there?

I am not myself online. My relationship with language changes dramatically when I type. I would venture to claim this is not a unique experience. It’s an experience I’ve discussed at length with friends. Different media convey different reflections of ourselves. When I text, I am certainly Gabe Lepak, but I am not myself, not fully.

When I write, I am not myself either, let me be clear, but I read once that a person’s handwriting is their voice on a page. In a world where I crave my friends and the ones I love and can’t have them, the faintest memories of their voices are far better than a reflection of a reflection in a text.

So, beginning in the fall, letters streamed in and out of my hands as I mailed friends and received mail from friends. Carrying shards of our hearts, the letters dwelled on anything and everything they could: anxieties, hopes, black eyes, and feathers in our caps. I’ve kept every single one I’ve ever gotten. They only finally got a permanent home as the stack grew too unwieldly for my dresser. The plan was never to continue into the summer. I wouldn’t need to. We would be together again.

So, when we suddenly weren’t, I returned to the one thing I knew would make it to my friends: letters delivered by the USPS. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” was the message. I was told it was their motto. (It’s not, the USPS doesn’t actually have a motto, but still) it made sense. After all, the USPS has a legion of nearly 500,000 employees, carrying around 47% of the world’s postage, to 42,000 ZIP codes across America. To quote the USPS itself: “The Postal Service is the only organization in the country that has the resources, network infrastructure and logistical capability to regularly deliver to every residential and business address in the nation” as well as “[receiving] no tax dollars for operating expenses and [relying instead] on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.” Admittedly, the latter point doesn’t matter to me. I’m willing to pay taxes to maintain a functioning postal system if need be.

Which makes the sudden uptick in anti-postal rhetoric beyond bizarre. The USPS is the most popular federal agency in the entire United States. Gallup has run the poll 4 times so far: 2014, 2017, 2018, and 2019. Every single time, the USPS has been number one. The 2019 poll saw the USPS walk away with 74% of respondents saying they were doing an “excellent” or “good” job.

There’s always something in the way, isn’t there?

The USPS is amazing at what it does. It takes about a week to deliver a letter from one end of the country to the other. That doesn’t sound terribly impressive, but the USPS isn’t sending one letter: it’s sending 19.7 million mailpieces each hour. That’s 5,464 every second. It’s a logistical miracle that the 400 million mailpieces processed and delivered each day get where they’re bound.

And those 400 million mailpieces can (and do) go to everywhere in the United States for the same rate. The USPS has a team of donkeys that they use to deliver mail, food, and supplies down an 8-mile trail to the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The letters that go to the Havasupai cost the exact same as a letter from one major city to another.

Would a private company do that? If Amazon suddenly took command of the delivery of postage, would every stamp still cost the same? Would your house be profitable enough to be on the mail routes?

When something gets in the way, because something will always get in the way, space, disease, or some other calamity, who will you trust to deliver a message?