Writing the Harry Potter stamps story for Muggle… uh, sorry, for non-philatelist news people the other day made me think about how I felt about this issue and other recent actions by the U.S. Postal Service.

I realized I’m not upset that the U.S. is issuing Harry Potter stamps with only a minimal connection to American culture or history. Other countries’ postal services are going or have already gone that route. Get used to it. As a collector, I have the option of deciding what I buy, what I keep, and what I skip. I’m already fairly selective.

No, what is annoying me is <i>how</i> the USPS people in charge of stamps are doing things.

Twenty stamps on sale for Harry Potter all at once — $9.20 – is overkill. Why not release four a year for five, as the Postal Service did with its Disney stamps a few years ago.

Need to put the Hanukkah stamps on sale sooner, because your customers are wondering why there are Christmas stamps on sale but nothing for the Festival of Lights? Fine, do it – but change the first-day cancels to the actual first-day date. Already canceled the ceremony programs and other merchandise with the old release date? Then at least make a postmark with the correct date available to collectors.

Oh, and don’t put stamps with a Jewish theme on sale for the first time on Shabbat! That’s insensitive.

Don’t care what a bunch of (in your view) out-of-touch stodgy cultural elitists think should be on stamps and what shouldn’t? That’s your prerogative. Tell the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee it’s disbanded or only responsible for a few issues a year. Don’t just ignore CSAC; that’s rude. It’s as if someone took my writing and replaced it with Wikipedia text.

What ought to worry the general public is that most of the members of CSAC are not stamp collectors. They’re experts in American culture, including pop culture.

First day cover collectors (like myself) have their own particular gripes: The postmarks are too big and often don’t print well on actual envelopes and stamps. The information about the postmarks and even the issues themselves is withheld, often until the day of issue. Yes, other countries produce their own cacheted first day covers. None sells as many FDCs as the USPS, not even when you factor in the differences in population.

You don’t want to kill FDC collecting: When stamps are put on first day covers, they are “retained;” they’re not going to be reused ten or 20 years later. Contrast that to the stamp you love to tell us is the most popular ever, Elvis Presley. I’m seeing it now in face-value bins at shows and discount postage lots. Stamp collectors and others are using them to pay for mailings. The Postal Service got a loan, not a gift on all those sheets that were thrown into dresser drawers.

Millions of the Elvis stamp, though, were used on first day covers, and not one of those will now be used for postage.

The same thing is going to happen with the $2 Jenny Invert Reprint. Thousands will be purchased by people hoping to hit the jackpot with one of the “unverts” (with the airplane rightside-up). Thousands of the stamp will end up on packages and letters.

My Latin teacher, Anthony Fiorella, used to say, “Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.” (I know it wasn’t original with him.) The Postal People now in charge of the U.S. stamp program aren’t learning from history.

What worries me, though, is that the “Mickey Marketeers” now running the stamp program don’t care about the history. If so, they’re not alone. The attitude in Corporate America these days is join a company, puff up the bottom line, collect the bonuses, parlay the short-term success into a better job, and move on to another company, never looking behind at the wreckage.

I hope that’s not what is happening with the U.S. stamp program. If it is, I hope the people responsible move on before the damage is permanent.

Every so often, something blows up in a stamp collecting organization of which I’m an official, and my wife asks, “You do this for fun?”

It’s gotten to the point where she doesn’t even have to be in the room, doesn’t even have to know about the latest flak; I hear her voice in my head. “You do this for fun?”

Oh, it happens in some of the music organizations in which I’m involved, too, but not as often. You’d think with all the pressure involved with performing, there would be more blowups there, but, no, I guess putting stamps away in albums or on envelopes is more stressful than hitting that high A, in tune, with everyone in the band listening to your solo.

It would be easy to blame it on the Internet: After all, any jerk with a computer and an Internet account can go on Facebook and say nasty, untrue things about you. Heck, you don’t even need your own computer and Internet: You can go to the public library and use their computers. But it’s been going on since long before the Internet.

More than 40 years ago, as a high school student, I sat stunned in a band parents meeting as the group’s president and vice president, a lawyer and a doctor, “pillars of the community,” screamed at each other until they were red in the face — and then kept going.

I don’t remember what the issue was, but it wasn’t very important. (In my story for the next day’s local paper, I brushed it off with “After a spirited discussion….”)

We live for our avocations.

About a decade ago, the American Philatelic Society engaged a public relations/advertising agency to promote both the hobby and the organization. It came up with the slogan “We feel your passion.” The agency workers were amazed at how strongly stamp collectors feel about things others consider relatively unimportant.

It’s not even just leadership issues: I’ve seen the passion stoked by plans to change an organization’s logo or whether the group should take PayPal.

I have a theory: For so many of us, our day-to-day lives are mundane, maybe even boring. Ah, but in our hobbies and avocations! There we are important, there we have an opportunity to make a difference, there we are somebody!

Plus, collecting stamps or playing music or raising funds for a high school trip is what we’d really rather be doing, not moving paper from one side of the desk to the other or sweeping out the bus aisle. Our hobbies are also part of our identity: “My son’s soccer coach” or “the lady’s auxiliary president,” rather than “this insurance agent I know.”

Most of us will work for 40 years, often in the same field. While there may be a progression within that profession, after awhile, the job becomes routine. The excitement of going to work wears off.

Most of us accept that. We get our vocational joy in our avocations.

“My day job? That’s just what I do for money. What I really care about, though, is…”

And when something goes wrong or, worse, not as right as it could, that passion turns to anger.

Maybe it’s worse in stamp collecting because so much of what we do has to be precise: The measurements of a perforation, the alignment of a stamp on a cover, the date on which a service was performed. Sometimes the so-called “flyspecks” really do matter.

We philatelists have to learn to lighten up. There are times I want to grab stamp collectors by their throats, shake them, and scream, “IT’S A HOBBY AND IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, DAMMIT! SO HAVE FUN OR ELSE”!

Then I stop and take a deep breath.

Seven score and 10 years ago, the President of the United States gave a speech that lasted about two minutes. The featured speaker at the cemetery dedication went on for two hours.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” Abraham Lincoln said, but he was wrong: Today, the “Gettysburg Address” is considered one of the greatest in American history. It’s also quoted, and parodied, throughout our history and literature.

On the other hand, maybe Lincoln was thinking of the U.S. Postal Service. We have at least two stamp issues coming out this year on November 19th, the 150th anniversary of the speech, but none is for that event. Instead, we’re getting two crassly commercial issues: Harry Potter and Hanukkah.

Lincoln wasn’t Jewish, and couldn’t play Quidditch worth a darn, so I can’t see servicing Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial covers with any of those stamps.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m looking forward to both of those issues, even though I know they’re pandering to specific non-philatelic audiences. Jews will buy the Hanukkah stamps because, well, they’re not Christmas stamps and some send out cards for this minor holiday because Christians send out cards for their holiday. (Has the U.S. Postal Service ever considered stamps for the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the major holidays when Jews also send out cards? No, I didn’t think so.)

When I first head of the Harry Potter issue, in a blind listing in a stamp program chart in the Postal Bulletin, I thought, okay, the books spurred adolescents in this country to read voraciously. Since then, I’ve been told the stamps feature the movies, not the books, and I’m finding it harder to justify. At author J.K. Rowling’s insistence, nearly all the actors in the movies are British. The locations are British, too.

Then we were told the location for the first-day ceremony, and the light dawned: It’s in Orlando. No location within that city was mentioned, but “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” at Universal Orlando Resort is there. What a coincidence!

Universal has already announced a major expansion of the Harry Potter attraction for some time in 2014. Although the USPS is rushing out the stamps on November 19th — a date apparently set by the Potter people — they won’t be universally available (sorry) until January, when there will be another big media push for the stamps. Another coincidence!

So what’s on November 19th? Just a wild guess, but a press release on the Universal Orlando Resort media website says the Hogwarts Express locomotive is now in place, and will carry patrons between different parts of the Harry Potter attraction. Perhaps November 19th is the day that train service begins.

However, that the Postal Service seems almost desperate to sell stamps isn’t the point of this essay. The stamp that it’s not issuing is: The Sesquicentennial of the “Gettysburg Address.”

Amid the 16 varieties of flag stamps, more than a dozen flower stamps, 12 construction stamps and the rest of this year’s bloated issue program, wasn’t there room for one more historical issue? I count six this year (Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Rosa Parks, Battle of Lake Erie, West Virginia Statehood, March on Washington), six if you throw in the Grand Central Terminal Express Mail stamp (it opened in 1913).

Unfortunately, there is precedent for a lack of respect for the “Gettysburg Address:” The only other stamp the U.S. has ever issued for the speech was in 1948, the 85thanniversary. That was a year in which even chickens got a stamp, so it was no big honor. There was no stamp for the centennial in 1963.

That year, and this year, we had stamps for the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point of the Civil War. But those stamps commemorate death and destruction. Why no stamps for great public speaking? Great statesmanship? Great leadership?

I hate to sound like one of those fuddy-duddies 16 years ago who began every complaint about stamps that weren’t issued with, “We have a stamp for Bugs Bunny, but not :” And I’m looking forward to the Hanukkah and Harry Potter stamps. I plan to service my Dragon Cards first day cover cards for both issues.

But I’m also going to service Dragon Cards for the Gettysburg Address. They just won’t be first day covers of a stamp commemorating the speech.