Students will decide very early-some say the first day of class-whether they will like the course, its contents, the teacher, and their fellow students. Whether it is a large introductory course for freshmen or an advanced course in the major field, it makes good sense to start the semester off well.
None of this bodes well: for the attractiveness of our cities, for our sense of self-respect and intelligence, or for our capacity for self-government.Beginnings are important. The effect may be not unlike what goes on in my native Iran, where the official prohibition on alcohol is upheld only in the breach: It's there, everyone pretends to respect it, while many millions indulge in grog secretly imported from abroad or brewed by moonshiners.Īnd just like in Iran, where an unlucky few end up getting caught and flogged by the Islamic Republic for drinking alcohol, so, here, there is always the possibility that the restrictions will suddenly snap back, whether to combat monkeypox or climate change, and you will be unlucky enough to run into the unbending, zealously committed flight attendant who insists on your wearing a mask-or the Basij militiaman who insists you get flogged for drinking. In practice, I suspect, this disconnect between what the law telegraphs and what people actually do will promote a widespread contempt for law. Masking and social distancing aren’t enforced at my kids’ school. Save for a few sad, middle-aged, white women, no one hesitates to get into the elevators even if there are already two residents inside (a big no-no at the height of the pandemic). Almost no one in my building masks up anymore.
Then there is the deleterious effect of all this on how people perceive public laws and regulations. Everywhere looks like a clinic everywhere looks vaguely medicalized. As if the mounting piles of garbage strewn about cities like Gotham weren’t enough, there are now, everywhere you look, pictures of vaccine syringes, of emoji-style faces covered by masks, of sexless, joyless stick figures standing sufficiently apart, earning them a cartoon thumbs-up, and so on. For starters, there is the sheer ugliness of all this biomedical signage. On Monday, following her first day of pre-K, my 3-year-old daughter found endless amusement trying to match her feet to the socially distanced ones painted on the ground.įar be it from me to begrudge her such cheap joy, but really, I would rather we extirpated all of this from our environs. Speaking of the school, the six-feet markers are still painted on the sidewalk outside the entrance, a relic of when parents were barred from accompanying their children into the building and had to line up outside every morning for drop-off. My local bodega still has all the mask signage, as does the one 30 blocks uptown, next to my kids’ school. Even now, there are still signs in the lobby hectoring us to wash our hands-Covid doesn’t transmit by touch, as we knew by the spring of 2020, but whatever-and to cover our mouths while sneezing, compounding officiousness with an unmistakable insult to our intelligence. Start with my co-op apartment building, where signs sternly ordering residents to mask up and to keep apart were still posted as recently as a couple of weeks ago. Whether by sheer force of inertia or bureaucratic determination or, most likely, some combination of the two, much of the Covid signage remains. But stroll my corner of Manhattan, for example, and you’d be blameless for thinking it’s April 2020. In areas that never went all in on these measures, the remnant signage is likely to be rare or nonexistent hard as it may be to believe for Californians and Amtrak-corridor denizens, some parts of the country moved on a year ago, if not earlier. No doubt, the rate varies by city and region. It is impossible to quantify the share of public space covered by outdated signage.
0 kommentar(er)
