Listen to “Vent: No Mailers!” on Spreaker.
Please indulge more of a vent today than a typical commentary…
If you stop and think about it, the intrusion isn’t much different from a perfect stranger walking through your front door completely uninvited. First to the refrigerator, emptying it of your preferred provisions. Then to the living room, occupying your favorite spot on the couch while swindling the remote and landing on a program you’d rather endure a root canal than watch.
What could be so bold, so daring as to invade your solitude? Political mailers.
Unlike pretending not to be home when someone unwanted rings the bell, this favored campaigning tool offers no real escape.
You can’t opt out of a mailer. I’ve tried. Those who know such things say the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 created a neutral stance for mail delivery. The Postal Service can’t discriminate based on viewpoint or message — good in theory, but clearly political mailers were not top of mind. If a campaign pays postage, uses proper addressing, and the material is lawful, it gets delivered like everything else.
And of course, political speech is protected by the First Amendment. Again, all well and good, but surely our elders might have reconsidered – maybe drafted a one-line exclusion – had they known the agony of nonstop campaign flyers.
The last resort? Cancel mail service, as Mr. Kramer once tried to do. Or only order packages from retailers that use a private carrier. Bills come by email now anyway. Short of ripping the mailbox out of the ground — which would likely prove useless, as the bundled stack of junk would probably end up on the front stoop anyway — one is left with few options.
One extrapolation crossed my desk recently estimating roughly $2 billion was spent on direct mail during the 2024 campaigns. What a waste.
Postal statutes and free speech aside, what about the right to be left alone? The right to avoid exposure to propaganda pamphlets — many of which are flat-out false?
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (attributed) spoke of one man’s right to swing his fist ending at another man’s nose, perhaps mailers should have been included in the principle.
Here’s an idea: the candidate who does not send a mailer gets your vote. Seriously, to those running, it’s understandable – you want your message out and you want to tell us about the other guy. But there are better ways to do it. Less intrusive ways.
For now, my kids enjoy pitching them straight into the trash before they ever make it inside our home.
Sadly, Congress or a state legislature will never ban mailers. If they tried, lawsuits would follow, years would pass, and little would change.
So on this spring Friday, here’s to hoping the next round of mailers somehow falls off a truck and never makes it to our mailboxes, or that candidates stop sending them.