I was out and about on Saturday and ended up dropping by the shopping mall formerly known as The City. (The name may be familiar to the few of you who managed to finish Philip K. Dick's quasi-novel VALIS, though it was miscapitalized there.) The City has gone through many rebirths and retcons and what have you, and is currently known as The Outlets at Orange, even though most of the stores don't appear to be outlets at all, just ordinary stores.
Anyway, I took a few pictures and this is what it looked like. It's kind of weird. Orange County is ground zero for a lot of anti-mask nutbaggery, but out in real life nearly everyone is masked up. Even after the CDC's latest announcement, most people continue to wear masks outdoors, let alone indoors. I'd say about 75% of the crowd at the mall was wearing masks.
Would you say the disparity could be characterized by race, or not?
Maybe they’re following the CDC guidance? NYT says 41% of Orange County residents are fully vaccinated, although that counts from receiving second shot so the actual number 2 weeks post second shot is probably more like 30%. So 70% of people would be masked if following the rules for indoor or outdoor in a crowded area.
The ironic thing is that in real life it will likely be the vaccinated who continue to mask and the anti-vaxxers and GQPers who are unmasked.
I've stopped wearing a mask just for being outdoors. When shopping. it goes on before I get out of the car, and stays on till I'm done, even if I am in and out of stores and going to various shopping centers. It's just easier to deal with that way, especially since I tape the damn thing to my nose so as to eliminate foggy glasses.
We are social animals and 'mask on' is the dominant paradigm.
Garden center (Stein's) here in Mequon was packed. Same thing, inside and out, everyone's still wearing masks. I think it's understood to be a kind of courtesy here and sensible since we're still seven weeks away from the 4th.
That picture encompasses the total number of people I have seen wearing masks in east TN, where I reside.
OC is very much divided between the John Birch/Libertarian coastal richies and the rest of the place. That mall counts as the rest of the place I would imagine. Where do the Huntington Beach types shop? I have no idea and don't really want to know.
There's a lot of cultural momentum at this point. I went to several shopping malls in the Dallas suburbs yesterday and was amazed that >90% of people still had on masks. And this is a region with a lot of Trump supporters.
We are creatures of habit. It took time to convince people to wear masks, and it will take time to get them to collectively stop wearing them.
I'm fully vaccinated, but I still wear a mask. Besides erring on the side of caution like everyone else, I also don't want to be mistaken for a Trumpee anti-masker.
Creatures of habit?
Virtue signaling?
Or, even though we realize there's no good reason to do so, we still wear masks because we don't want to be attacked by the Gasht-e Ershad?
All three are probably important, and insisting on the importance of one misses the big picture.
Of course only one of these forces the situation to continue against the will of most of the participants...
Thirty years ago that crowd would have been 75-80 percent white. Now there are zero whites. The great replacement is real.
It's wonderful, isn't it?
I guess, if you are into auto-ethnic cleansing.
go back far enough and they would have been entirely people of color. the great replacement is real.
In a sense yes. Of course 'The City' or whatever it is called now wouldn't be there, the population density would be something like 1/1300th , etc.
But more important, what happened to the Amerinds is generally considered a bad thing...why would white Americans volunteer for that fate? Although, maybe it is much like the Amerind groups on the East Coast, one side (Dems) inviting the foreigners in to help with internal battlers, just as some Indian groups in what is now New England allied with the English settlers and encouraged more settlement.
The racism is real. Also, there are white people in the picture. And you wouldn't expect families moving on the sidewalk to be a mix of races so much.
You and your one-drop rule and all.
If wanting your own race to prosper in places that they, for the most part, built, then racism isn't wrong.
Who walks with their arms folded? What is wrong with you people?
People with cold fingers.