Postal Strikes and Existential Crisis(es)

To My Youngers,

So the post office went on strike last Friday. Not the old-fashioned sandwich-board, oil-drum-fire, scabber-filled, country-stalling general strikes of old, but instead a rolling strike meant to (hopefully) inconvenience us enough to (hopefully) make a point. I’m still trying to decide if it will be (has been?) effective at either.

My favourite response to this ‘whole ordeal’ (if we can even call it an ordeal at all…) was a friend’s facebook status: “Oh no! A Canada Post strike!? That will totally affect my daily life. Just like when the typewriter factory went on strike and all the monocle franchises shut down.”  I think it pretty perfectly sums up the first reaction of your average Canadian (right down to the self-effacing take on so called ‘important things’). I found the post pretty durn funny, but I don’t really know how I feel about the strike itself... A few people responded with good reasons why they were upset about it (not receiving pay cheques, trouble invoicing or mailing out merch) but on the whole everyone seemed to agree- Not only was this rolling strike not really going to affect most of us, it is just downright humerous.

I myself bemoaned having to use a fax machine to send some government-type forms (like being forced to watch a movie on Betamax), but in all honestly, I was a little sad that I wasn’t more upset at the temporary (if spottily temporary) inability to send actual physical things through the mail. I can be a bit of a neo-luddite at times- I own three typewriters, a super-8 projector, a tape deck, and a collapsible overhead machine. I love old things. I love old technologies. I love winding film, and watching for cigarette burns, and setting type by hand. But I also love being able to talk to my cousin on skype even though he lives halfway across the world. I love being able to take my entire music collection with me anywhere I go. I love viewing vlogbrothers videos and being inspired by my modern metropolis. I love being able to watch Dr Who the day its aired on BBC and not having to wait weeks and weeks to borrow a tape of it recorded off of a friend’s Space channel… I’m sitting on a cliff on an island in the middle of a lake, writing this on my laptop and posting it online- Can I really simultaneously do that and mourn the loss of the importance of the postal service?

Is it possible for us to still value a method of communication (in the original sense of the word, everything from roads to photographs, to mail, to texting) if it ceases to be the most useful method? Is there an actual place in the world for things that no longer have a use? The obvious answer, logically speaking is ‘no,’ but that just doesn’t seem to be right. What about Art, and Film, and Music, and Literature? What about Bicycles? What about Chocolate? What about… everything that makes life interesting? But how do we tell what’s what- what’s worth keeping and what just isn’t?

I think that the rolling postal strike has made a point, but I’m not sure that it was the point they were trying to make. Maybe we are at a place where physical mail just isn’t really needed anymore.  Maybe my former thoughts on importance and usefulness are antiquated and no longer reflect my view of the world. But the idea of not having a National Mail Service makes me pretty sad, just like the idea of closing down all the typewriter factories and monocle shops. But what if their time has simply come, and all the being-sad-about-it in the world isn’t going to stop anything.

Then again, vinyl hasn’t sold this well in over thirty years…

-E