Leadership Quote by John M. McHugh

McHugh is trying to make a bureaucratic reality feel like common sense: the postal system is handling less physical mail because the country moved on. The sentence piles up "e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages" in a deliberately breathless list, a rhetorical inventory meant to sound self-evident and unstoppable. It functions less as a revelation than as a permission slip for policy change: if the stream has "diminished", then cuts, consolidation, or restructuring can be framed as adaptation rather than retreat.

The subtext is a quiet political maneuver. By attributing decline to technology, McHugh shifts responsibility away from lawmakers and postal management and onto history itself. No villain, no controversial decision-making, just progress. That matters because postal debates are never only about mail; they're about jobs, rural access, and the symbolic promise that the state reaches every address. "Unlike then" sets up nostalgia only to undercut it: the past had volume, the present has efficiency. It’s a subtle way to tell constituents that affection for the old system is understandable but impractical.

Contextually, this is a politician speaking in the language of inevitability. Notice what’s missing: any mention of the postal service’s unique public role (universal service, voting-by-mail, medication delivery), or the idea that electronic communication doesn’t fully "replace" physical infrastructure. The line aims to narrow the argument to a single metric - mail volume - so that the harder questions about civic obligation can be treated as an accounting problem.