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Video Shows Subway Riders United In Effort To Persuade One Man To Wear A Face Mask
By
Ben Yakas
Published Nov 5, 2020
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Nov 5, 2020
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With the U.S. reporting more than 100,000 new coronavirus infections yesterday, a new single-day record, the pandemic is very much still a major ongoing concern around the country. Despite all the city's COVID guidelines, there are still some who stubbornly refuse to wear masks while out and about—even here in New York City. And this week, a group of straphangers banded together to try to convince one such misguided person into masking up.
The incident happened aboard a Queens-bound J train while crossing the Williamsburg Bridge around 11:40 p.m. on Wednesday. "I witnessed him refuse three people offering him a mask to wear, then proceed to cough in his hand and touch the subway poles next to him," said Toby Medlyn, who took the video. "At that point, I decided to call him out after seeing his refusal and blatant disregard of public safety."
As you can see in the video below, the man denies every entreaty to just wear a mask. "I live by my principles," he said. "It's the little things that diminish your soul. I don't wear a muzzle."
One person tries pleading with him, "You're not alone in the world," to which he responded, "I can say what I want to say while I'm alive."
"Are you special?" another asked him; he responded, "I am special, I'm living right now, I'm fucking special."
At different points, the man claimed that wearing a mask is "a cult thing going on here" and that masks don't work to stop the spread (according to the CDC, they greatly help to slow the spread and reduce transmission, especially indoors).
The argument goes on, and people tried to reason with him about the particles from his mouth spewing and spreading throughout the subway car, which he scoffed at. "Do we know what you have? Do you know what you have? No," one straphanger said.
"This is the terror of America. This is the terror. You frightened people, you frightened fucking people, and you're gonna tell me what's up. Are you a scientist?" the man responded.
At one point, the man tried to garner sympathy from a woman sitting across from him. "You see how people react to me?" The woman responded, "Yeah, we're all the same people. We're all mad. There's a reason we're yelling at you."
"I'm gonna speak my truth while I live, my name is Justice," the man declared at another moment, which caused people to laugh and angered the man. "What's so funny, I'm sharing my truth?"
Medlyn said he felt sharing the video was necessary to demonstrate the issues we still have with mask adherence in the city, but that it also speaks to the fact that most of the people in the video were united otherwise.
"It was nice to see that still the greater majority of New Yorkers are bound together in care for the greater good of each other," Medlyn said. "[The man] did decide to go into the other train car at the next stop. I thanked the people who offered him the mask. Literally every single passenger in that car was wearing a mask."
Since April, the MTA has had a public service campaign running to remind mass transit riders to wear a mask. In September, they announced they would give out $50 fines to straphangers who refuse to wear a mask. The Port Authority announced this week that they would also begin giving out $50 fines to anyone who refuses to wear one at local airports and PATH trains.
There have been other similar incidents and confrontations on the subway in recent months, but this new one comes as New York sees a spike in cases — daily new infections have topped 2,000 for about a week now, after having plummeted to around 650 during the summer.
Tagged
pandemic
MTA
coronavirus
subway
masks
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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