Every letter sent but not delivered, you see, is like a tiny death A little piece of "unfinished business" An open loop in the emotional fabric of the universe A broken promise, a missed opportunity, a lost glimpse of a world that might have been
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I don't know what goes through Postmaster Louis DeJoy's mind when he goes to bed at night But I hope the sheer physical weight of those bags and bags of mail all over the country hangs on him until it makes it hard to breathe
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As Pratchett vividly describes, I hope some part of him understands the sacred trust the fraternity of couriers has held since time immemorial How obscene it is to break the sacred trust one carries when you take someone's words and promise them "I'll make sure they get this"
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And unlike the letters in the book we know what a huge percentage of the mail DeJoy has ordered "held" must say Because his order to hold that mail was a conscious decision to silence those voices, to kill those messages and stop them getting through Not negligence but murder
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If a letter undelivered is a little death, a tiny gasp of unfinished business, then a vote uncast is that twice over And the ghost of those dead letters is a ghost of a better world that could have been if that sacred trust had been upheld, if those voices had been heard
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In Pratchett's goofy po-mo universe every little subculture, every random profession and avocation and fandom gets its own religion, its own gods and its own afterlife Every postman hopes their soul arrives at its destination signed, sealed, delivered
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Louis DeJoy might want to check on whether his own soul has sufficient postage and insurance Because there's a high chance that when he passes on, karma loses him in the back of the truck, and writes him off as "Lost and Undeliverable"
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I hated it when I got a letter in the mail and found out that my dead girlfriend had twin babies with my archnemesis and hid them away in Europe where they rapidly aged to adulthood
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Well if they'd sent an email you wouldn't have been able to confirm their story by doing a DNA test comparing the saliva residue on the envelope and the sample of her corpse you collected by digging up her grave
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minor correction - I'd say that it's fantasy internet - "c-commerce", choosing "GNU" as the clacks header flags etc.
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It's an amalgamation. The name is chosen for its assonance with FAX, people running out in the middle of dinner to check if they have any messages is reminiscent of people with pagers, the supersitious (h/cl)acker culture is *very* early internet (Pratchett loved usenet).
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