“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

—USPS

Last week our local Ocean Park post office was not processing mail it seems Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. For four days my box, moved over from the closed Nahcotta post office, was empty and lonely. I know I’ve been raving on and off about the closure of our little community gathering place — AKA the post office in Nahcotta — since the woman who bought Carol Wiegardt’s property poked the bear — AKA the USPS — and they just said, “That’s enough of that,” and closed the doors. But I guess I’m not yet finished with my rave.

Of late, the nice folks at the OP post office — where all our Nahcotta boxes were transferred — have begun requiring that those of us who lost our old-fashioned combination boxes in Nahcotta must now add an “N” after our box numbers in order to get our mail delivered. Before this was made apparent to me, I lost two packages returned to sender for lack of that N. (For want of a nail, the war was lost…)

Add to that the fact that packages cannot now be delivered to my porch at home, as was the case for years, unless I also have a box on the road. Further there is major confusion about whether my street address requires an Ocean Park or a Nahcotta zip code. (Little by little, Nahcotta is fated to fade into memory.) Then the indignity of snow day closures. Yes, we had a little sprinkling of snow, though I refer you to the unofficial old-timey motto above, “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat.…”

Our wet covering of white last week was enough to stop our mighty post office and the megalith Amazon? Evidently. Also the side door, the one closest to all the boxes, has been closed and locked for two weeks because parts aren’t available. (It’s a door for Pete’s sake — how unique can that be?) And now we find out that the community bulletin board at the post office will be removed. Am I just a craggy old whining elder or what is the world coming to? I guess I will die on this hill — with a “this isn’t how things used to be” whiner patch sewn onto my sleeve.

Constitutional crisis?

But now, we return you to the news: eggs are back on the shelves. Note though that inflation is creeping up again. This past week’s Consumer Price Index showed the largest single-month increase in inflation since August 2023 (tinyurl.com/7fwa2acb). Trump’s tariffs and JD Vance’s foreign policy missteps have spooked the markets. Amid other broken promises, our president and vice president want to curry favor from our enemies (Russia) and disabuse our allies (Europe) of our continued cooperation on many matters (Ukraine, Gaza, USAID, trade, climate change, health research, etc.).

Closer to home, the firing of 4,400 U.S. National Parks and Forest Service workers, including some in Washington and Oregon, means many snow parks, popular hiking trails, and favorite campgrounds are closed. (Note that visitors to the North Cascades National Park, east of Mount Baker, added more than $26 million to the local economy in 2023. Nationally, America’s parks brought in $55.6 billion to the economy and supported more than 400,000 jobs (tinyurl.com/bde8mfwh). You might also want to watch this video of immigrants chained up at SeaTac (tinyurl.com/4jvj8bxb). Musk posted this gleeful comment “Haha wow.”) Too much winning?

The speed with which Trump and his DOGE buddies have put the U.S. government and its Constitution in peril is astonishing. Some — like the Feb. 12, Chinook Observer letter to the editor author (tinyurl.com/Malin-letter), seem happy with the current state of affairs. Some are pleased that the longstanding role of Congress as the keeper of the purse strings has been ripped away from the House of Representatives. Our Constitution clearly outlines the three-way triumvirate and co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — meant to provide a check on power and keep our democratic ship of state afloat.

This current executive branch power grab is tilting us into what many are now saying will, or perhaps already is, a constitutional crisis not seen since the Civil War. Executive branch team members are already establishing sword-rattling threats that indicate they may not be inclined to follow court orders.

The Supreme Court, in its first decision on President Trump’s use of executive power in his second term, ruled on Friday that he cannot, for now, remove a government lawyer who leads the watchdog agency that protects whistle-blowers.

But the court’s brief, unsigned order indicated that it may soon return to the issue, noting that a trial judge’s temporary restraining order shielding the lawyer, Hampton Dellinger, is set to expire soon.

Who moved my cheese?

This current state of affairs brought to my mind two perhaps relevant books of past years. Popular decades ago, one was a standard read for corporate leaders about the pace of change in the early Internet-tsunami years — “Who Moved My Cheese?” This is a tongue-in-cheek tale about the outrage of mice used to finding their cheese in a given spot and, then, returning to that spot find nothing. Where is my cheese? Who moved it and why? The obvious answer is — duh — the cheese is gone! The sooner you stop returning to that old place, the sooner you can figure out where is it now and what to do about it

The second book is a prescient short story written by E.M. Forster called “The Machine Stops” about a post-apocalyptic world run by, we might now say, AI, in which humans live in hexagonal high-tech cells separated from one another. An array of buttons provides foods, pleasure, sleeping areas, opportunities for remote conversations with others, classes, and various other mind-numbing entertainment and distractions. We soon find that this civilization is taking place underground because of the supposed degradation of the air, water, and soil on the surface of the earth. One brave soul begins to question this and attempts to break free, alerting others to the dangers of the Machine. Forster wrote his tale in 1909!

These stories both point to one theme: the very difficult job of understanding what is actually happening in front of our eyes. It’s difficult because we are all fish in a fish bowl and cannot generally see the bowl or understand the water we’re swimming in.

This aforementioned letter to the editor author and I would undoubtedly disagree on many things, except perhaps this one: big changes are happening now. How we interpret them, what we choose to understand about these changes, what the results will be, and how we respond to them will likely be very different and critically important.

All I’m saying is this: we used to live in a country where the mail got through in a timely way no matter what; where the judicial rule of law was the law of the land; where cooperation with our allies was essential; where honesty, empathy, and thoughtful leadership were givens.

I’m not a Luddite. My home is littered with devices (and chargers!). Obviously the world is different now and spinning at an increasingly fast pace, but that doesn’t release us from our responsibility of keeping track of what’s happening, and, if we can, making sure changes improve this amazing world we’ve been given. Oh, and P.S., the robins are back — so spring can’t be far behind.