MAYBE MY NEW PEN PAL will get her greeting card without too much more delay, no thanks to the havoc Donald Trump has wreaked on the U.S. Post Office.
By RAHN ADAMS
MORGANTON, N.C. (June 10, 2025) — As we watch 79-year-old Donald Trump prepare to celebrate his own birthday with a taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar military parade in D.C. and a manufactured declaration of martial law in L.A., let’s take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Remember the old campaign question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Well, how about this: Are you better off now than you were six months ago — you know, before Trump took office again?
By any objective and reasonable measure — egg prices, inflation rates, constitutional rights and freedoms — an honest American’s answer to both questions would be Oh, hell no.
But we live in strange and careless times when we seem to be turning the fictional nightmare of 2001: A Space Odyssey into the factual horror of Trump’s Project 2025: a society run by cold, heartless machines.
Last week, I got a simple lesson in what can go wrong with hiring HAL 9000 to run even the mail room. For me, it cost only the price of a postage stamp. But for a new friend of mine, it might have been a bigger deal.
Here’s the short version: I use a free USPS service called Informed Delivery, which sends me a daily email about pieces of mail that I will receive that day. It keeps me from having to check my post office box in Boone as often.
One day last week, I was notified that I would receive what appeared to be a birthday card or invitation addressed to someone who lives all the way across the state from me — in the Bladen County town of Elizabethtown, N.C., or E-town, as the card’s sender put it.
My understanding is that the Informed Delivery program’s scanned photos (see above) are taken at the regional mail-processing center in Greensboro. So when I saw the apparently misread address, I assured myself that the eyes and hands of some human postal worker between Greensboro and Boone would correct DON 9000’s error before the misrouted mail was put in my P.O. box.
No, I got it, anyway. Apparently, the only thing the Boone postal worker looked at on the face of the envelope was the addressee’s P.O. box number, which was the same as mine — just a couple of hundred miles away.
But all’s well that ends well, I guess. I looked up the addressee online and learned, among other things, that she’s 87 years old and does, in fact, have the same box number as I do. So yesterday I put her unopened card in a larger envelope, addressed it correctly (that is, legibly), and sent it to her from the rural-delivery mailbox at our studio.
If I hear back from her, I’ll let you know.
My actual point, though, is this: The Trump administration continues to tear down the “old,” people-oriented ways of doing things in favor of largely untested artificial intelligence-driven computer systems programmed by amoral scoundrels like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They’ve collected all our most sensitive data now, and they’ve dug into every aspect of our lives, like moles tunneling across a putting green at Augusta National. They now have the power to shut us all out (or down), just like in the movie.
Is that what you want? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?