The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is composed of 100 organizations including church organizations, labor unions, disability rights and immigrant rights activists, the League of Women Voters, and more. This coalition recently sent a strongly worded letter to Congress urging for robust funding of the USPS in the next coronavirus response package.
Calling the USPS “an essential and critical public service to the people of our nation,” the letter added, “A vote against adequate, timely funding for the USPS is an anti-civil rights vote.”
And Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman joined with Secretary of State Jim Condos, her Democratic counterpart in Vermont, in issuing a public letter that stated unequivocally, “This is not a political or partisan issue – voters in red and blue states depend on the Postal Service to participate in our democracy…. Our democracy relies on this critical institution, and secretaries of state need Congress to do its part to ensure the foundation of our elections does not crumble.”
The importance of a national mail system and the essential safeguard of having paper-ballot elections have become intertwined in the 21st century. Both have deep roots in our history. Both are vital to our future. And both are under varying degrees of attack right now by entities that one might, in less crazily partisan times, expect to behave as allies.
But civic-minded Americans – whether they are elected officials like Kim Wyman, or activists like Rhodes Bailey, Angela Lang, Kathy Sakahara or Kirstin Mueller, or devoted students and teachers of the political system like Professors Oldendick and Shaw – understand that this country’s swing toward demagoguery and extreme chauvinism is in danger of harming our nation’s very framework.
“If you’re leading with a candidate, that’s not enough,” Angela Lang emphasized in our phone interview. “It’s important for people to understand the roles and responsibilities of the offices themselves. It’s really understanding how the political system works.”
As our nation navigates the global pandemic, the civil unrest and the bitterly fractious politics of this presidential election year, it ends up being we, the people, who will determine if we can preserve and improve on these systems and hold this country together.
Just as candidate Rhodes Bailey said, we’ve still got some work to do.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.