Update on the shipment to me from Brooklyn!

Nil. No movement. Still received by the post office but not yet accepted.

So I’ll continue with the topic of blue box removal by the USPS.

Yesterday I walked to drop something in the mailbox. On the corner of Beverly Drive and Gregory Way, there had been four blue collection boxes. Now there is only one.

So I looked at Google Maps to see when they had been moved. For those who are unaware of the Google Maps feature to go back in time, it exists. In the upper-left corner of street view there’s a clock face with a drop down arrow. If you click that, you can see the street view photographs from the past. So I did that.

I saw that at the beginning of the Obama presidency, there were five boxes: an Express Mail box and four non-Express Mail blue boxes.

Shortly after Obama took office, the Express Mail one vanished. Express Mail has gone through some overhaul, including the rebranding as Priority Mail Express, too, but that’s another topic.

These four existed for the duration of Obama’s two terms. They also existed during Trump’s first term through the midterm elections.

After the midterms, three disappeared.

Now, there are people who point out that the Obama administration allowed for thousands of collection boxes to be removed over the course of eight years. Some of those people use that fact to explain away Trump’s action as though the outrage must be anti-Republican sentiment. This argument also assumes that people who are outraged at what’s going on now aren’t upset about the closure of sorting centers, etc. that have slowed down mail delivery. That, too, is flawed.

When I got a post office box, I sent a postcard to myself that I mailed from the post office it was going to be delivered to in an effort to make sure that my mail was being delivered successfully to it rather than being forwarded to the prior owner’s new address. It took many days for it to arrive. I would have preferred that to be faster.

But the thing most wrong about the finger-pointing at the prior administration as an excuse for what the current administration is doing is that we have fewer boxes left to remove.

It’s like if you go to a party (remember parties?), and Bobby takes half the cake and throws it on the ground. Aw, man, Bobby! OK, but there’s still enough cake. Then Dave takes a third of the cake and stuffs it into his pockets. I don’t imagine anyone will come to the defense of Dave by saying, “It’s OK that there’s only a 1/6 of the cake left to split between everyone because Dave was justified in taking 1/3 of the cake after Bobby rendered half the cake inedible.” Everyone who is neither Dave nor Bobby gets screwed.

The problem is not simply Louis DeJoy. Louis DeJoy is a symptom. You can say post hoc ergo propter hoc all you want, but I find it difficult to believe that these aren’t priorities of the Trump administration overall. Both DeJoy and Trump have got to go.