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Notes -
I don't think I agree with your take as far as COVID normalizing masking on public transit. I think that in some places it may have had the opposite effect. Anecdotally, when I would in the past see a person on the train or walking along a city street with a mask on, I barely thought anything of it. To the extent that it stood out, I just assumed that person maybe had a cold and was a little extra conscientious than the average. It didn't seem particularly weird, and it communicated a completely negligible amount of information to me about that person.
But now, after everything, when I see a person in a mask it means something different. It's no longer an empty signal that tells me nothing about the person. Now it communicates to me that the person is weird. That they may be still gripped by fear, that they may be mentally ill, that they may be excessively credulous when it comes to authorities that I consider untrustworthy, or that they may be an extreme partisan of some kind. For some reason they are still not over COVID as a phenomenon.
It's hard to see a random masked individual any other way now, and I don't like that. I don't like that my initial read of someone who is wearing a mask is now "this person is a COVID weirdo that I should avoid", rather than "this is just a slightly more conscientious person than average." For one thing, now I don't even like putting on a mask at times when my own personal level of conscientiousness suggests would be appropriate, due to the perceived symbolic power of the mask. I don't want to look like a weirdo.
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