Welp, there goes Susan B. Anthony
Published 08-20-2020
I find much to laugh about in the Trump years.
Just a few short years ago, young women lead a parade to Susan B. Anthony’s grave, leaving their “I Voted” stickers on her headstone after casting a vote for Hillary. Newsweek covered the “monument of hope” as women cast their ballots for a female candidate for president and memorialized the occasion by paying homage to one of the founders of the Women’s Suffrage movement.
Meanwhile, Anthony is being cancelled by The New York Times as an “increasingly divisive figure, adopted by anti-abortion forces and criticized for relegating Black suffragists to the sidelines.” Her “problematic” stances were featured in a story about President Trump announcing a posthumous pardon to Anthony for her arrest after illegally voting in 1872. She was tried and convicted in 1873, and given a fine of $100 plus court costs which she never paid.
The irony that all of this is happened on the anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment on this exact day in 1920 is most definitely not lost on me.
Cue the inevitable and increasingly ridiculous freak out by politicos and activists, including New York’s Lieutenant Governor who demanded the President rescind the pardon, claiming Anthony chose to not pay her fine as part of her cause to gain women’s rights while she was alive. The most hilarious part though, she said the President “treated Anthony like a criminal.”
Anthony was, by definition of her still standing conviction and non-payment of the fine, a criminal in the eyes of the law. And it was her choice. Both things can be true.
Considering the President was celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, and a reality that includes women holding any job in society, including being considered for the presidency, one might surmise that Anthony might actually be pleased by the results of her civil disobedience in just 100 years.
Although, I could also be discouraged by a society who was at the point of elevating Cardi B. as a feminist role model, while removing histories of an anti-slavery activist like Anthony… for the cardinal sin of not being woke enough in the 1870’s.
Most assuredly, all thinking people need to erase from polite society the woman who said, “Forget conventions; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best word, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.”
I’m not going to bother with what passes as prose from Cardi, to each his or her own. But it’s definitely not my style of female empowerment, and I don’t think many lines would make it past editing.
Not even on a day celebrating the accomplishments of the suffragettes and the women’s rights movement can everyone not make it about Trump.
A President offering pardons and proclamations is nothing new, but this one must be made political, and is just the latest teed up outrage that changes as often as the news cycle.
Pardoning Susan B. Anthony does not change one detail of her disobedience. It does not erase her arrest, or her bravery to stand up for what she believed unjust.
Her history is American History, it does not belong to a side or a gender. It belongs to America.
But at least it’s a change from hearing about the Post Office....
If I can believe half the news in my Facebook feed, at least the ones that made it past Facebook’s fact-checkers, President Trump’s new election gambit, sure to help his fledgling re-election chances, is to cancel the Post Office?
I mean, of all the departments to go to bat for, Democrat’s latching on to the post office is a new twist, but if you think about it, makes perfect sense.
Heck, its been run worse than many of the Democrat led cities currently experiencing the consequences of mostly peaceful protesting.
The problems with the Post Office would fill more than one column, but let’s suffice it to say, the business guys deciding to become Amazon’s delivery service at a contract below cost did so as a strategic choice. They knew taxpayers would ultimately subsidize the difference. These same decision makers, in light of decreasing mail usage in the digital age, chose to become an advertising and publishing company, selling and printing much of the junk mail they deliver, in direct competition to small businesses across the country who used the postal service as their delivery method.
Like most branches of a government that has become bloated and filled with corruption and cronyism; the multiple levels of federal management and regional depots with ever more managers have created a behemoth that requires more and more money while providing fewer actual services to taxpayers.
Is this a local carrier problem? Nope. There are layers, and machines and memos to follow.
No system is perfect.
Especially ones that explicitly tell you to not send valuables, like money, through the mail.
How we use the mail is markedly different than it was even five and ten years ago.
Vandalism of postal equipment and mail theft are more common crimes, and post offices have taken extreme measures including locking access to public mailboxes, moving boxes too more visible locations and limiting the number of locations to maintain.
Distilled down, I think the left might be calling for more local control of mail services... which to someone like me who thinks the federal government getting cut by half would be a good start... well, it would be a good start.
Breaking even would be a positive step too, but after all this noise centered around a postal conspiracy, I’m not too hopeful that lessons of any kind will be learned. In fact, keeping with the absolutely bizarre nature of 2020, I cynically expect bigger budgets and your birthday card from your parents to be found and delivered mangled in two months, instead of one.
The biggest impediment to the United States Postal Service innovating and modernizing is a union that demands the same employment and pensions of a pre-digital world and a federal government who thinks it knows best. Never mind what “it” actually is.
That has nothing to do with Trump. Or another American historical figure getting cancelled like yesterday’s mail. But both ultimately are just as ridiculous.