Letters: Readers discuss saving the US Postal Service and Americans’ financial needs

Rural lifeline

Those of us who live in urban settings are used to stepping outside our front door or going a few steps down the street to retrieve our mail. We may not stop to think about our fellow Kansans who live in very small towns or in rural areas.

My father-in-law lived alone in a small north-central Kansas town for several years after his wife died. He took at least one walk to the post office each day, just as many others in his small town did.

If his friends did not see him for a day or two, they checked up on him. They were a community where people cared for each other, and the post office was the hub of their contact system.

These same people needed the U.S. Postal Service to get their medicines because there was no pharmacy in town, and many of them no longer drove.

Please contact your members of Congress and ask them to protect the post office. As Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II wrote in a recent Star guest commentary, the U.S. Postal Service does not cost Congress anything except the postage for members’ franked mail to constituents, and it employs more than 650,000 people. And, it is much more than a mail service for rural and small-town residents.

- Libby Schoeni, Overland Park

More help needed

The guidelines scientists and doctors give us are for the safety of all. Our personal sacrifice and inconvenience are horrible, and a second relief check from the government is in order. There are too many families to feed and businesses to support.

- Kathryn Reece, Olathe