I just went to go pick up dinner from an Indian restaurant a few blocks away. I passed by maybe 20 or 30 stores: laundromats, bodegas, 99cent stores, restaurants, bike shops, etc. There wasn’t a single place where everyone was wearing a mask.
I live in Harlem. When Biden won, there was partying in the streets. It’s a liberal neighborhood with an overwhelming majority of non-white people. It’s not an anti-mask, white Republican area that says COVID is a conspiracy.
Masks are no longer a political statement; everyone is just complacent.
I don’t even like going to my favorite bodega anymore, because of the three people who work there, only one wears a mask, and that’s only half the time. They know my breakfast order when I walk in, but I stopped going, because they don’t wear masks.
They’re not showing the overcrowded hospitals on TV anymore. Nobody is really talking about the lack of beds or the exhausted doctors and nurses. Therefore, too many people stopped taking it seriously, and they’re not going to take it seriously, because nobody is forcing them to.
Society in general has a limited capacity for prolonged negativity. Once a story has been terrible and dominating the news cycle for long enough, it becomes the norm, and nobody cares about it anymore. The news has had a steady undercurrent of COVID information for the past 9 months, and now, too many people have tuned out. So many people went home for the holidays this week, rational people who would never have thought of getting on a plane in April or May. We have more daily cases and deaths now than we did in April, but the difference is people don’t care as much, because they’ve maxed out on the negativity and they don’t hear it now. They don’t process it.
So yeah, the anti-mask conspiracy theorists and COVID deniers are terrible. They’ve been terrible this entire time. But now they’re not the only ones without masks. The neighborhood bodega man isn’t wearing one either, because he just got tired of it. And that’s so frustrating.
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