The lesson for today: As John Lennon sang so many years ago, “Imagine.”

It’s what we have to do amid the daily craziness in Donald Trump’s second term. On Monday alone, it was a $400 million “emolument” (bribe) from Qatar; peace talks without a ceasefire in Ukraine; and a deal-making trip to the Middle East without a stop in Israel.

So let’s imagine a better future for the U.S. Postal Service, whenever the coast becomes clear to create one.

One little-noticed departure was Louis DeJoy, the logistics expert hired during Trump’s first term to oversee the nation’s oldest public service, existing under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution was ratified.

DeJoy, like his recent predecessors, positioned the post office to compete with UPS and FedEx for the growing package business, while ignoring the only thing it’s constitutionally required to do: deliver the mail.

But he went to greater extremes, relentlessly increasing the price of a First Class stamp while steadily decreasing service provided, a surefire formula for continued decline in mail volume, leading to extinction unless halted and reversed.

DeJoy resigned in March, allegedly because DOGE and Elon Musk loomed, but actually because his latest grand experiment in reorganizing postal zones flopped when it was rolled out in three test markets at, of all times, just before the 2024 election, which nonetheless went smoothly.

Putting it bluntly, DeJoy’s a computer whiz, but terrible at dealing with actual people — there are still 640,000 postal employees — and actual pieces of mail. He’s not alone.

Since the 1990s, postmasters general have fixated on installing ever-larger mail sorting machines in fewer postal centers, meaning letters travel a really long way just to get handled for delivery.

Many years have passed since sorting ceased at “sectional centers” created when ZIP codes were introduced in 1963, back when the postmaster general was a Cabinet officer.

Maine had many sectional centers, including Biddeford, Portland, Lewiston, Augusta and Bangor. Now mail is processed only in Scarborough and Hampden, after facilities were moved to the suburbs, and DeJoy unsuccessfully tried to close Hampden.

It’s much worse in rural areas with long distances between post offices. In one absurd example, mail deposited in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that used to be delivered across town takes three to four days after routing through Omaha, Nebraska.

This was DeJoy’s parting gift, also including a slowdown of packages, not letters, to Puerto Rico from six days to 12 days. Actual service remains better than that, but don’t count on it continuing.

Meanwhile, a First Class stamp increased from 49 cents to 73 cents over the past 10 years (49%), mostly during DeJoy’s five-year tenure. By contrast, it took 80 years, starting in 1885, for increases from 2 cents to 6 cents.

Coupled with continued service cuts and price increases, we have a recipe for disaster. What can be done?

First, create several public and consumer slots on the Postal Board of Governors, which generally rubber-stamps whatever the postmaster general wants. The postal unions that have seats seemed all too willing to indulge DeJoy’s shenanigans as long as he didn’t cut their pay.

More importantly, we have to reverse the trend to fewer and fewer places handling the mail. It’s as if government responded to the first PCs by mandating that everyone had to continue to use IBM mainframes that would get larger and larger as time goes by.

We also should decentralize processing. Yes, bring back the Augusta and Lewiston centers and add local sorting at every sizable post office, and we’d drive down costs while increasing the speed of delivery. We have smartphones at our fingertips; surely we can phase out giant but ineffective sorting machines.

The decline in First Class volume has clearly become a self-fulfilling prophecy under DeJoy and likely his successor. Americans still want to mail things, and they should be able to expect they are delivered promptly.

Post-pandemic, it’s still not happening. On one Augusta rural route, if the carrier is indisposed no mail is delivered that day; there are apparently no back-up carriers.

Yet on Sunday packages always get delivered. Part of making the system more efficient is to, wherever possible, put mail and packages back together and not delivered on separate runs.

Mainers, like many Americans, voted by mail in 2024. Some 43% of ballots were absentee. We apparently trust the Postal Service more than other government agencies.

Universal service at a reasonable, across-the-board price has long been the hallmark of the U.S. postal system, once the envy of the world.

We’re never going to re-create the original system; the digital world is not going away. But we could do a lot, lot better.