The “Featured Photo” for this posting is of the space in front of the post office where an outside mail collection box had stood for decades but was now gone.
Prologue: On August 18, 2020, I went to my local post office to mail off the postcard stories for that week and I discovered that the Post Office mail collection box had been removed – Missing in Action! Where it had stood in service for decades was now just empty space – the remains of the bolts that had held it in place, sheared down flush with the concrete.
Now I had been reading and hearing in the news about efforts made by the current administration to disable and hinder the ability of the post office to deliver mail-in ballots to the polling centers on time to be counted. I had had a hard time understanding how those responsible for these blatant and out in the open efforts were expecting to get away with these actions, and, without much thought, I just assumed these efforts were targeted to the so-called swing states and/or designed to enhance and complement the efforts within those states currently active with their own schemes of voter suppression. So when I arrived at the post office and saw that the outside mail drop off box was gone and that there was a strange notice inside the post office giving notice of a very restricted mail collection time, I was just amazed that this was also happening in California, in Los Angeles – in the Valley! Initially I was stunned and still and silent, but then I quickly resolved to take action.
Now, my internal response, and the actions I eventually took and the pieces I wrote (including these posts), were generated by two deep waters already at the time surging around me. The first, pouring forth from within the church I attended, a prominent Evangelical church, was to me the polluted fountain and faith corrupting flow of political ideology washing over, obscuring, and at times even replacing Christ, the simplicity of His gospel, and the observance of the two great commandments. The second deep water – so renewing and energizing, so needed – was the impression the memorial service for John Lewis, on July 30, 2020, had made upon me. The service of this great and faithful American again focused my heart and mind on his urging to get into “good trouble” for the sake of justice. President Barack Obama in his eulogy, spoke of Lewis’ final words to the nation “to vote”, with the former president following this with an impassioned call to protect the vote and to fight the seemingly endless attempts at voter suppression, including the current and ongoing attempts to hinder the post office from delivering mail-in ballots to the polling centers on a timely basis. The parallel currents of these two very different rivers – one a convergent flood of spiritual darkness and corruption and political deception and moral deceit, made even more evil and toxic by the swirling of their deliberate intermixing – the second, a river of honor and gratitude for the legacy of John Lewis, a reminder of the godly strength and endurance of a Christian faith empowered by a love of God and neighbor, and a drive and thirst for justice – these two rushing streams together triggered, refined and energized my own desire for “good trouble” in response to the suddenly empty space in front of my local post office – in the Valley! – where a mail collection box had stood undisturbed and in service for decades.
Being a would-be writer, my first response was to write my House Representative and two U.S. Senators, the Los Angeles City Mayor, the Governor of California, and everyone else who I thought should know about these pernicious and unjust attempts to corrupt and weaponized against the American people the Postal Service – a government agency created and funded to serve the people, rather than to deny and thwart their right to vote – all with a view towards undermining the vote and our democracy, and subverting the republic.
Letter Written to Representative in Response to the Missing Mailbox.
From: Chris Orozco []
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 11:07 PM
To: @mail.house.gov’
Subject: Neighborhood Post Office
From: Chris Orozco
Address: Address
Contact: email
Dear Representative Name,
I am writing concerning the recent actions by the Post Office to suppress mail-in voting by dismantling the efficient operations of the postal service in handling the increase in voting by mail nation-wide. Attached is a photo of the spot in front of the Neighbor Post Office at Address where until very recently a post office collection box has stood since at least 1985 when I moved to Neighborhood. Also attached, is a photo of a new sign placed within the post office near the only mail drop now for the post office, which states, “30 Day Notice: This collection box is pending a collection time change to 10:00 a.m. – Posting Date: August 1, 2020.”
This notice makes no logical sense, as 10:00 a.m. is the first collection time already stated on the standard collection time notice below the mail drop slot. However, this puzzling and seemingly innocuous sign actually becomes ominous if it is giving notice that the only collection time will be 10:00 a.m. – the same hour that the post office opens! This notice then becomes the official means to deny a letter a postmark of the day that the letter is dropped through the mail slot, if the letter is placed in the box after 10:00 a.m. I believe this is the actual deceptive intent of the notice, and it is therefore to me a blatant criminal attempt to corrupt the integrity of our election process and subvert the foundations of our democracy.
I am aware that the House has confronted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over these actions and he has stated that further USPS changes will be suspended. However, his suspending of further actions is not sufficient. His public pronouncement, like most others from this administration, seems false and misleading, and seems designed here only to keep in place the obstacles to a free and fair election he has already employed. The mailboxes nation-wide need to be reinstalled and all deceptive notices, such as this one in the Neighborhood post office, must be removed and all collection policies returned to those previously issued before this criminal attempt. Please do everything you can to ensure that the political skirmish with the Postmaster General, and the seeming gain of the House, does not become just a cynical smoke screen, but that the stated gains are made practical for all the states, counties, cities, towns, and rural areas, for, yes, we are still one nation.
Please let me know when the mailbox will be reinstalled at the Neighborhood post office.
Thank you for the courtesy in reading this letter. Thank you for continuing to champion the civil rights of your constituents. A free and fair election is foundational to the security of our constitutional rights, our survival as a free people, and the well-being of our democracy and nation.
Sincerely, Chris Orozco
I then sent an email copy of the letter to my family and selected friends with whom I shared very similar views and misgivings about the political intrusion into the church.
Thu 8/20/2020 8:52 AM
Family,
Taking the injunctions from John Lewis seriously – if you see something, say something – I saw two things at the Neighborhood Post Office that greatly concerned me. So I took photos and wrote the letter below to my congressperson. If I had more time, I would have it made shorter, but I wanted to get it off on Tuesday. I will also write my two Senators and the Speaker of the House with my concerns with these blatant intrusions into our election process, that I don’t think will be reversed. I suggest you check your own post offices to check for similar changes and take action.
Dad/Chris
I then received email and text messages back that several members of my family and friends had/were checking at their local post offices and were finding similar and even worse irregularities at their post offices. A few were also planning to write their representatives.
Then on August 25, 2020, I received an email from the California Secretary of State – ACTION REQUESTED: Track your vote-by-mail ballot – that I thought at the time was in response to the letter I sent the governor, but was actually going out to all those for whom the state had an email, or something like that. The state’s email was an advisory about California’s state ballot tracking system that you could sign-up for through your resident county so that you could automatically be informed by email about your ballot’s progress to the central polling center each step of the way. I thought this new, innovative system was definitely worthy informing others about. I decided to forward the state’s email to my family and to now a wider circle of friends so they could track their ballot and verify a timely receipt by the polling center. My email wasn’t “good trouble”, it was just “good-good”.
As I developed my list of family and friends to send the state’s email to, I only hesitated over putting one person on my list. I hesitated to forward the email to this person because through our many hours of extensive conversations on Christian faith and spirituality, which at times touched upon the political intrusion into our church, I always sensed something either not fully disclosed, or something that may have been there, but which I did not quite understand. There was something missing, something I was missing. I hesitated a bit, as I did not want to offend him unnecessarily, and I prayed about what I felt, but at the end of this process, I understood the Holy Spirit’s direction to send the email to him. After all, the email was just about a way to track your ballot, which with all the controversy about mail-in ballots making the headlines, this should be welcome news to all. With still a tinge of unease, but trusting in the Lord and confident that He would accomplish His purposes, I forwarded state’s message with the same covering message I sent to everyone and forgot about it and went onto other things that I was writing.
On Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:05 PM Chris Orozco <> wrote:
Friend, wife,
Below is an email I received today from the California secretary of state. I probably received this in response to the letter I sent the governor (and also Mayor Garcetti) concerning all the disturbing changes at the Neighborhood post office. I also wrote our congressperson and state senators.
This email concerns a tracker – like the Amazon tracker – for your mail-in ballot for November’s election. This looks like a wonderful tool that I thought you might be interested in.
Chris
The next day, I received the message below from the friend to whom I had hesitated forwarding the email.
Wed 8/26/2020 9:41 PM
The President thanked pastor MacArthur for taking a stand and said church is essential. They also discussed that “from a Biblical standpoint” why Christians couldn’t vote for a democratic candidate. “There is no way a Christian can affirm the slaughter of babies, homosexual activity, homosexual marriage, or any kind of gross immorality…no way we could stand behind a candidate who is affirming transgender behavior,” MacArthur said as he referenced Romans 1.
After I read this, I sat back a bit to ponder the message and the intent behind it. My friend had begun his email message questioning me if I agreed with the message I was about to read as he affirmed he did, but the following content of his message seemed just to come out of nowhere and without an obvious connection to the email I had sent. I even went back and looked over the message I sent forwarding the tracking email – and, no, there was nothing overtly political, unless he had taken issue with my description of the changes at the post office as disturbing. Perhaps he already knew of the changes at the post office, though I had not informed him. I was quietly puzzled but honestly not completely surprised by the message.
As I carefully read this short message a few times, I finally recognized that the body of it was derived from a video interview our pastor had done recently with the Liberty University Falkirk Center, a conservative media center at Liberty University. Another friend from church had sent me a link to this interview just a few days before and, after reading and pondering my friend’s email response, I realized that the reluctance and hesitation I felt in forwarding the ballot tracking memo to him was centered on the then unarticulated sense I had that he was perhaps actually onboard with our church’s overt political support of this man. Maybe sending me this quote was his way of reacting to something that he viewed as not supporting the president’s reelection – though I had not written of any specifics in my email message to him. The apparent strength of his response also surprised me. To me, it had all the overkill of combat boots stomping a lily of the field into an unrecognizable pulp of nothing, though…that just may have been the overall tone of what was actually quoted. My first thought was to just ignore this response and not engage as I had many other things to write, but I decided to think and pray about my friend and his message and wait till the next day to decide if it was best to reply or not.
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