COMMENTARY Change Arrives, Ready Or Not

The U.S. Postal Service is planning to eliminate Saturday mail delivery.

I can remember from my boyhood that the postman delivered mail twice daily.

Long ago, however, that was cut to once a day.

That was change, just as the current plan to end Saturday delivery would be.

There is good change, bad change, and, well, just change.

From various perspectives, including costs, the planned postal change makes some sense.

In this era of e-mail and iPads and Blackberries, as well as FedEx and UPS, oldfashioned postal mail is less essential. Personally, I still prefer to pay my bills by putting a check in a stamped envelope and mailing it off. That just seems a little safer than doing it online.

I recognize, however, that the old mode of delivery is fading.

Most of us are uncomfortable or uncertain about accepting and coming to terms with some of the changes that affect us or which we believe may do so.

Perceptions of what change represents and in some cases fear of what change may bring are stirring much of the political ferment that rocks the nation today.

Some of the change that is occurring - legislatively,demographically, and in our national financial status - is a cause of apprehension and protest among some of today’s outspoken activist groups.

The nation’s fiscal condition is indeed a cause for alarm, and that’s one reason the planned Postal Service cutback might make sense in that it would help reduce deficit spending, though it represents only a rather minimal fraction of our federal deficit.

However, many of those now expressing great concern about spending and deficits were not heard from only a few years ago when those deficits began piling up and when the previous presidential administration didn’t even bother to calculate the costs of the open-checkbook spending related to Iraq.

And, don’t forget the costly but unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefits in 2003.

Clearly, the cause of protest goes well beyond the issue of out-of-controlspending. It feeds and feeds off the broad disaffection with Washington politics.

And it reflects concern about change, some of which is based on misinformation, and some resulting from fear of the impact of change.

Although Franklin D. Roosevelt told the country that the only thing it had to fear was fear itself, fear of change hasn’t disappeared.

It was abundant in some quarters 50 years ago in resistance to Supreme Court rulings on desegregation and to the civil rights movement.

Demagogues seized on that fear of change to gain and maintain political power.

And it did result in some fundamental alterations of political alignments in the nation.

Will we see a similar pattern occur in the current atmosphere of resistance to change - exemplified by the plaintive, “I just want my country back,” echoed at many of the tea-party rallies?

Of course, it’s not any one person’s or group’s country. It belongs to all of us and we have to find common ground for the system to work - even though some believe that there is no possible common ground and others view the compromising spirit necessary to find that terrain as an unacceptable abandonment of principle.

This in turn, contributes to the heightened level of polarization, particularly inWashington. It has also led to another change - a change in tone of what passes for political discourse. Nastiness in politics is nothing new, but it has taken on new dimensions and degrees of virulence. Consider, for example, the reported comments of a leader of the tea-party movement in Arkansas urging others to let their elected representatives “think you are crazy,” and to “do whatever you can to get them out of our lives.” That same activist, by the way, referred to Fayetteville as the “liberal armpit of Arkansas.”

Just as we need more fiscal responsibility in government, we need more rhetorical responsibility in the public dialogue. We also have been reminded that fear of change is easily provoked and manipulated. And, speaking of change, we do need more accountability and transparency in government.

That should be a common goal, regardless of where one stands along the political spectrum.

There is a relentless constancy about change, as we see with the changes in the level of postal service.

Change can bring both opportunities and challenges and when public policies and public services are involved, we should make change work for the common good.

HOYT PURVIS IS A JOURNALISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS PROFESSOR.