Apartment Buildings, Mail-In Ballots, and Other Things I Got Wrong TLWH 0925.26

Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily missive, Letters From an American, keeps my perspective on current events grounded in American history. Reading her newsletter today inspired this column.

Honoring the September 17 anniversary of our Constitution, it began with this quotation from the late Benjamin Franklin. He said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

At 81, Franklin was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He valued wisdom over certainty, and saw compromise as a virtue. He openly admits that age, new facts, and clearer thinking repeatedly shattered the absolute certainty he felt as a younger man.

When I was a Bloomington taxpayer, and Governor Perpich and some Canadians decided a huge mall should replace my beloved Metropolitan Stadium, I thought the whole idea was ridiculous. I thought everyone saw what a failure it would be, financially and otherwise. 

I was wrong. Needing a place to stroll in the winters before we moved north, we became official “mall walkers” at MOA. Clocking in and out, we earned points for a special T-shirt, shared espresso drinks, and ate a warm Cinnabon. 

Sometimes my certainty proves right. After moving to Las Vegas in 2000, and until the totally foreseeable real estate bubble burst in 2007, I resisted all invitations to join friends in buying rental houses. 

In recent years, as local housing authorities found developers to build apartment buildings in Grand Marais, I was certain they would fail. Housing shortages exist in Cook County, and have for ages. I assumed people who wanted to live on the North Shore wanted space—an acre or more of land—a rural life where peeing off your porch wouldn’t attract Johnny Law. Were these the kind of people who would want to live “elbow to behind” in an apartment complex that looks like it could be in Rochester, Eden Prairie, or even Las Vegas? 

I was wrong. Renters are filling up the new units. A friend recently told me that this year, for the first time in maybe forever, the local school district filled most of its staffing needs thanks to the increase in available apartments. 

After losing many an argument to him, my old pal Allen always said that eating crow isn’t bad if it’s cooked right. After years of being often wrong, but never in doubt, I’ve eaten my share of crow.

Ben Franklin was not only a wise philosopher, but he was also the first Postmaster General of the United Colonies on July 26, 1775. Now that the postal service is being looked at to manage voter eligibility and identify the legal status of addressees, it needs to get back in its lane. It has neither the staffing nor the technology to do anything beyond delivering mail tendered to it.

In the Postal Service Act of 1792, Congress clearly established the system's operational objectives. Recognizing the value of informed citizens, it allowed all newspapers to be mailed at extremely low rates. It barred postal officials from opening private mail and mandated expanding post routes to remote frontier settlements, even when those routes were unprofitable, like our North Shore.

The USPS has taken a lot of abuse over the years, but it plays a unique and vital role. Half a century ago, business-to-business invoices and payments were all sent by mail. In my publishing years, we’d have failed without the USPS, which got our newspapers to subscribers from the Arizona deserts to the farmland of the United Kingdom, and to the post office boxes in town — not always fast, but always.

Mail service is, for the most part, consistent. True, since leaving its distribution zone, my weekly North Shore Journal generally takes a week or more to get the 60 miles from Silver Bay. But it always gets here. 

The USPS has never been in the business of deciding whether to deliver a piece of mail to the addressee shown on the envelope, for any reason.

Time for some more crow cuisine. As publisher of the Cook County News Herald, I wrote editorials decrying election officials' and county commissioners' efforts to make the entire county subject to mail-in voting only. I argued that the good-citizen act of going to a polling place, even in a remote part of the county, deserved reverent consideration regardless of cost. 

Mail balloting is the most secure form of voting. Each state should determine how it is conducted, without interference from the business/quasi-government agency that ensures newspapers get favorable delivery rates.