PHILADELPHIA —
For likely the most 2,000 or so twelve months-spherical residents of Deer Isle, Maine, the fraying American flag start air the submit office this spring was a reminder of the nation’s mood.

The flag was in tatters. It curved within the wind from a single hook. But it no doubt was stuck within the up situation, so the postmistress hadn’t been in a situation to interchange it.

“I used to be pondering what a metaphor it’s for our country staunch now,” neighborhood wisely being director René Colson Hudson said. “It was no doubt predominant that the flag get replaced, as an emblem of hope.”

Colson Hudson, a gentle Unique Jersey pastor who moved to coastal Maine a few years ago, posted an on-line plea on April 23 that sparked a neighborhood thread. Must peaceable somebody scale the flagpole? May perchance well well the local tree-trimmer encourage? Did they desire a bucket truck?

By week’s reside, a secret helper had gotten the flag down. Postmistress Stephanie Sad quickly had the fresh one flying high.

Colson Hudson, 54, had regularly ever ever visited her submit office when she lived in suburban Unique Jersey. But in Deer Isle, other folks alternate little focus on within the lobby, advise faculty events on the bulletin board and clutch up medications and mail-in ballots — while postal workers take an glimpse on all people’s wisely-being.

“Right here,” she said, “it’s the center of neighborhood.”

A STRUGGLE TO FLOURISH

Loads of the nation’s 630,000 postal workers are going via fresh dangers right via the COVID-19 outbreak, as they kind mail or fetch day-to-day rounds to succeed in other folks in far-flung locales. Extra than 2,000 of them comprise tested definite for the virus, and a union spokesman says 61 workers comprise died.

For most American citizens, mail deliveries to homes or submit containers are their simplest routine contact with the federal government. It’s a service they appear to love: The agency constantly earns “favorability” marks that top 90%.

Yet it’s no longer wisely-most current by one influential American: President Donald Trump, who has threatened to dam the U.S. Postal Provider from COVID-19 relief funding except it quadruples the equipment charges it bills expansive prospects love Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, whose protection rankles Trump.

“He is prepared to sacrifice the U.S. Postal Provider and its 630,000 workers attributable to petty vindictiveness and personal retaliation against Jeff Bezos,” Procure. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said final week. “That will perchance perchance be a tragic result.”

Postal Provider officers, bracing for steep losses given the nationwide coronavirus shutdown, warn they’ll bustle out of cash by September without encourage. They reported a $4.5 billion loss for the quarter ending March 31 — on $17.8 billion in revenue — sooner than the plump effects of the shutdown sank in.

Some in Congress wish to jam aside $25 billion from the nearly about $3 trillion relief program to preserve up the mail flowing. But with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pushing Trump’s priorities, the Postal Provider has to this level landed unbiased a $10 billion mortgage.

“The Postal Provider is a comic story,” President Tump told newshounds within the Oval Place of work on April 24. “They’re handing out purposes for Amazon and other web corporations and whenever they bring a equipment, they lose money on it.”

Historically, the Postal Provider has operated without public funds, even since a crushing 2006 laws required it to pre-fund 75 years of retiree advantages. It’s been spherical longer than the nation itself, with a filthy rich history that functions Benjamin Franklin’s tenure because the major postmaster fashioned.

This month, the USPS Board of Directors appointed Republican fundraiser Louis DeJoy to the submit. He succeeds Megan Brennan, a profession postal worker who is retiring.

The president insists greater equipment charges would possibly well perchance ease the Postal Provider’s monetary troubles. But most monetary analysts disagree. They divulge prospects would flip to UPS or FedEx.

Packages usually myth for 5 p.c of the Postal Provider’s quantity but 30 p.c of its revenue. And equipment revenue has no doubt long gone up right via the shutdown. Collected, it hasn’t been adequate to restore profitability, battered right via the salvage age by the decline of firstclass mail.

Michael Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Employees Union, with 200,000 participants, fears the Trump administration wants to destabilize the agency and then promote off.

With bigger than 30 million American citizens all of sudden out of labor, he wonders why somebody would put “600,000 staunch, residing-wage jobs” at possibility. These Postal Provider jobs comprise moved generations of American citizens, especially blacks and minorities, firmly into the middle class.

Yet the president, Dimondstein said, wants to privatize the operation when “here you comprise the submit office serving the other folks of this country in maybe a deeper intention than we ever comprise.”

A 55-CENT JOURNEY TO ISLE AU HAUT

On Henrietta Dixon’s mail route in North Philadelphia, every dwelling has a story. Dixon appears to be like to know all of them.

Alvin Fields moved lend a hand to his block of two-story row homes after 40 years working for Verizon. Jason Saal, 40, lives in an abandoned manufacturing unit he sold for an artwork studio, but now hopes to fetch industrial-grade masks there.

Sharae Cunningham would possibly well perchance even be making masks, however the hand-sewn kind, some with African prints she sells for $6.

All said they’d leave out the Postal Provider if it collapsed.

“It’s good to comprise mail delivered by a letter carrier,” said Saal, who mailed out two containers of masks via Dixon one fresh morning and gave her several free ones. “It’s the person that you just look, a government worker, daily, Monday to Sunday.”

They agreed the neighborhood, one of Philadelphia’s poorest, would comprise the profit of the develop of expanded products and services — equivalent to low-payment test cashing and wifi — that is the norm in Europe and can encourage U.S. submit places of work continue to exist.

“That’d be a expansive service. Plenty of oldsters must money tests,” said Cunningham, 40, who helps love chronically sick of us, four younger other folks and a grandchild.

Dixon, who lives nearby, has been with the submit office for nearly about 30 years, the final nine on her fresh route. Fields known as her “fully good.”

Her route, in a dense metropolis neighborhood, would be comely to personal corporations itching to compete with the Postal Provider. But the identical 55-cent payment that takes a letter across town also can fetch one to the Pacific Northwest, rural Appalachia or islands off the coasts of Alaska, California and Maine. That’s attributable to the USPS pledge to present “universal service” to all people within the United States, it’s no longer predominant what it takes.

“For the American psyche, it’s likely the most final places where we’re all equal. All of us comprise the staunch to a 55-cent letter and mail start six days per week,” said Evan Kalish, 30, of Queens, Unique York, a postal fanatic who’s documented hundreds of submit office visits on his blog, Postlandia.

A pair of miles south of Deer Isle, Postmistress Donna DeWitt walks the total intention down to a ship dock every morning to retrieve her plastic containers from the 7 a.m. mail boat and carts it as a lot as the little Isle au Haut Post Place of work a few hundred toes away.

And not utilizing a bridge to the mainland and wifi and mobile phone service on the island spotty, mail service is required to the 70 or so twelve months-spherical residents, who mostly work within the fishing and lobstering trades.

“I don’t to find you’d earn hundreds of the extinct-timers, as an instance, paying their bills on-line. They rely on the mail for all of their alternate transactions,” said George Cole, the volunteer president of Isle au Haut Boat Products and services, a nonprofit that brings the mail over on the 45-minute day out from Stonington.

The ferry service will get most of its revenue from summer season vacationers, however the little USPS contract helps.

“If we lost it, it’d be very painful,” Cole said. “We’ve carried the mail for 50 years.”

DEATH NOTICES, PLANTS AND PUMPKIN ROLLS

Filmmaker Tom Quinn jam out to fetch a movie a pair of town that lost its zip code — and its attach on the map — in a spherical of USPS closures in 2011. The film changed into a peep in loneliness.

“I began to to find what here is set,” said Quinn, speaking of his 2019 film “Colewell,” jam in a fictional little town on the Unique York-Pennsylvania border.

In places love these, he said, the submit office serves because the town’s lounge — a gathering attach for conversation, for human contact, for neighborhood.

“When this hub is there, you bustle into other folks accidentally,” said Quinn, who teaches film at Drexel College in Philadelphia. “It’s the identical reveal about Zoom and educating. None of these unintended interactions occur anymore.”

In rural Fayette County, West Virginia, Susan Williams fondly remembers postmistresses who left homemade pumpkin roll out for patrons, posted a existing within the lobby when somebody died and kept her mail-disclose geraniums alive.

“If I idea these plants had been going to realize while we had been away, she would unbiased start the containers and water them for us,” said Williams, a retired journalist and instructor who lives in Falls Ogle, about 35 miles east of Charleston.

And not utilizing a dwelling start there, she treks two miles to Charlton Heights to fetch her mail, attempting to realize after it will get put up at 10: 30 a.m. and sooner than the submit office closes at noon. On a fresh day in unhurried April, her box held her mail-in pollfor the presidential predominant. She deliberate to return it the following day.

“It diagram the entirety,” Williams said of the Postal Provider.

Wait on in Maine, Colson Hudson likes to make your mind up the mail boat over to Eagle Island within the summertime (twelve months-spherical population 2; seasonal, maybe 40) to traipse to chums. She once took an image of the mail to find, musing about who its contents would connect.

“All these other folks attain flocking down at the time the boat comes with the mail,” she said. “There’s one thing in that to find that they’re awaiting, that they’re hoping for.”

——— Associated Press reporter Matthew Daly contributed from Washington. Put collectively AP lawful affairs author Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at http://twitter.com/maryclairedale