This is an opinion column.

Before I was a husband and a father, I spent a lot of time in bars, one bar in particular on Birmingham’s Southside. Nights were fun there, but early afternoons were peaceful, and too many Saturdays I got there even before the mail had arrived.

Jimmy was the owner then, and in the afternoon he’d fiddle with inventory or fuss with payroll before taking his own medicine around happy hour. He wasn’t always the easiest person to be friends with and he could be harder to work for. I saw him kick drunks out of the bar because they looked at him funny, or he’d give a bartender hell for wasting too many paper napkins.

But no matter how surly he’d been the night before, the next day, he was always kind to the postman. Or, more often, the postwoman.

“Can we get you something?” he’d say the moment they’d walk through the door. “You want a Coke or a glass of water? Something to eat?”

I’d seen celebrities and other big shots come in that place and Jimmy hardly looked up from his drink. But he gave the U.S. Postal Service a more friendly reception than if a dignitary had pulled up front with a line of limousines.

Whether they accepted or not, the man or woman in the dark blue pants and light blue shirt was always appreciative of the kindness. And not one of them ever seemed used to it. For them, it was rare.

And it shouldn’t be.

How you treat the men and women who deliver your mail might say more about your soul than what you leave in an offering plate and more about your worth as a citizen than how much you pay in taxes.

I don’t measure well by this standard. I couldn’t pick my letter carrier out of a lineup. Like with a lot of homes, our mailbox sits at the end of my driveway, as distant from our front door as our property line will allow. My mail has two states of being — it’s there in the box or it isn’t yet.

And because of this virus and this president, a day might come when it won’t be there at all.

The U.S. Postal Service is suffering because two of its major sources of revenue — first class mail and all that marketing stuff you throw in the trash — have slowed because of the pandemic.

Like so many others right now, the Postal Service needs help.

But according to a report this week in the Washington Post, the president threatened to veto the $2 trillion CARES Act if it included a rescue package for that federal agency.

Mind you, major businesses are receiving bailouts with virtually no strings attached. In the last five years, airlines have paid out nearly $45 billion to Wall Street through stock buybacks. When asked why the government was tying a net under them, Trump responded with a shrug and a $50 billion handout.

“(I)t is what it is. Have to save the airlines!” he said on his favorite social media platform.

But the U.S. Postal Service?

Nuh-uh.

Trump isn’t alone in his disdain, but I don’t get why anyone hates the Postal Service? Who else can you give two quarters and nickel, say “Take this piece of paper for me to Terre Haute!” and then they do it?

Perhaps we’re conditioned to hate the post office because, every time we’re there, there’s somewhere else we want to be. No one ever goes to the post office to be at the post office. Only a handful of cities have airport hubs, but there are more than 30,000 post offices in our country, and every one of them smells the same — like glue and packing tape and paper and the sticky stuff on the back of stamps. I don’t like standing in line, either, but I still love that smell.

Despite what a lot of folks think they know about the Postal Service, it isn’t subsidized by our tax dollars. Aside from some federal money to help the blind with postage and to pay for overseas mail, its operating budget comes from the stamps you buy.

About 600,000 people work for the Postal Service, and the agency has long given hiring preference to veterans. For service members and reservists, the Postal Service has been a safe place to transition back to civilian life.

But now those folks are on our front lines again, not in some war overseas, but fetching and delivering the things the rest of us can’t leave our homes to get. Right now, they’re out there working for us, exposing themselves to surfaces they don’t control, touching stamps and envelopes that other people licked with their tongues.

If we can’t afford these folks safety in their jobs, the least we should be able to give them is some assurance they’ll be able to keep their jobs.

But so far, our president doesn’t seem inclined to give them so much as a glass of water on a hot day.

And that’s no way to treat a postman.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.

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