George W. Bush did not attend the funeral Friday of Thomas Morris Jr., although the services were an easy ride by presidential limousine from the White House. Nor did he attend the Saturday funeral of Joseph Curseen Jr. in Washington, although he was holed up that day in nearby Camp David.

This is, of course, understandable. The President is a busy man, trying to figure out how a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul was accidentally hit for the second and third times, and why the Taliban don't quit, and where in the vast world Osama Bin Laden might be hiding. He had to get briefed on the great economic stimulus package, to make certain that all campaign contributors would be stimulated. There were papers to be signed and phone calls to make.

And after all, Moe Morris and Joe Curseen were not heads of state, or generals, or bosses of oil companies. They were men who worked in a post office.

Morris was 55, quiet, a "brown bagger" who carried his lunch from home and had worked for the Postal Service for 32 years. That is, for most of his adult life. He lived with his second wife, Mary, in an apartment in Suitland, Md. — inside the Beltway, just over the line from Washington, where he grew up and went to school. He was passionate about bowling and served as president of the Tuesday Morning Mixed League at the Parkland Bowl in Silver Hill. On Oct. 16, his team won four games, wearing out their opponents. Five days later, he was dead.

Joe Curseen was 47, served in the Air Force, graduated from Marquette University in 1980 and followed his father into the Postal Service in 1985. A year later, he married his wife, Celeste. He was a runner and a basketball player and stayed in good shape. By all accounts, he was also a decent human being, generous with his time, a mentor to the young. A woman who knew him at Marquette described him as "a very gentle, faith-filled man" and he was an active communicant in St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Clinton. In his 16 years in the Postal Service, he never missed a day of work, until the last week of his life.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Both men had the bad fortune to work for the Postal Service when some criminal psychopath was sending anthrax through the mail. Each worked at the Brentwood Road mail-sorting facility in the nation's capital, and the infamous Oct. 9 letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle passed through that building. In the place where they worked, each inhaled anthrax.

Morris entered Greater Southeast Hospital on Oct. 21 and died later that night. On the previous Tuesday, Curseen felt vaguely sick. A cold, maybe. Or the flu. He went to work anyway. That Thursday, Postmaster General John Potter visited Brentwood Road and said there was only a very remote chance that anthrax spores had escaped from the sealed Daschle letter. He had been assured by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that testing wasn't necessary. Forget nose swabs. Nobody needed to start using Cipro. The message was simple: Relax, don't worry.

Like other workers, Curseen must have felt reassured. The next day, he was so sick that he went home early. On Saturday, while Morris was dying, Curseen fainted at Mass. Sunday morning, in an agony of stomach cramps and nausea, he went to the Southern Maryland Medical Center. He was diagnosed with a gastric disorder and sent home. By then, anthrax was the story of the moment: the Capitol closed, White House staffers popping Cipro, exposures at NBC, CBS, the New York Post, other sites.

In New Jersey, postal workers were known to have been exposed. The doctors either didn't ask Curseen if he was a postal worker, or Curseen was too sick to tell them. He was back early Monday and died, six hours later, of inhalation anthrax.

By the time Potter visited his troops on Brentwood Road, the world knew that the anthrax attacks — whether launched by fundamentalist Muslim terrorists or a homegrown idiot — were being handled for Bush by incompetent, bumbling men. Tom Ridge, the director of Homeland Security, turned out, under pressure, to be the emptiest of suits. He has a title and an office, but no power and no budget. He functions as a glorified flack, a spinmeister, a cheerleader.

Tommy Thompson, the shambling secretary of Health and Human Services, is worse: slovenly with language, incapable of stating blunt facts. Neither Thompson nor Ridge attended the funerals, either. Neither did Tom Daschle. Potter did go to the funerals. When the Morris service was over, he hurried away in a limousine. Morris' body was taken by hearse to the Maryland National Veterans Cemetery.

Ridge, Thompson and Potter will keep their jobs, of course, but their credibility is gone for the duration. Who can believe anything they now say? Instead of recognizing the mortal danger to all citizens, and particularly to postal workers, they chose to blather vaguely, to "calm the public," to insist on minimizing the odds of contracting anthrax. That is, they acted as if the public could not bear the hard, scary truth. Perhaps unconsciously (one hopes), they accepted the notion of two standards: one for congressmen, their staffs, the Supreme Court, assorted insiders and their rich friends; and another for mere postal workers. One group was certainly treated as more important than the other.

This should be an occasion of widespread outrage. Instead, it's being smothered by the need to create triumphant illusions, wrapped in patriotic symbols. But the way to ensure a love of country is to treat every citizen as the equal of the other. Mario Cuomo once said that politicians can't solve all problems, but they must manage them. The Bush team failed disastrously to manage the problem of death through the mail.

Terrorism Plus Indifference

To be sure, the Morris and Curseen families might not have wanted any politicians at the funerals, preferring to keep private their grief and anger. This would be understandable. Bush did write letters to each family. Potter had post office flags lowered to half-staff for three days.

But in the end, Morris and Curseen didn't have to die. Not this way. Not because of indifference or image-mongering or bald incompetence. They didn't know two weeks ago that they would never see an inning of the World Series, or watch Michael Jordan play a regular-season game for the Wizards. They could not have known that a combination of sick terrorism and stupid governmental incompetence would cost them their lives. We should remember them each time we pick up the mail. In their own way, they died for us.