Mask theatrics

September 8, 2022. New York City v Vermont.

I have no handy explanation for that. As for politics, NYC and Vermont are very similar. The Green Mountain State extols Bernie. The Big Apple boasts of AOC. One can tease out differences but in truth these are solidly blue parts of the American landscape. Rutland and New York are both “sanctuary cities” and both host newspapers (the Rutland Herald, the New York Times) that relentlessly hawk progressive narratives. But when it comes to how people in general treat one another, there is a chasm between the two places. Most New Yorkers these days eye one another with suspicion, as though expecting each passerby is just waiting for the chance to shove an unwary person in front of a bus or the subway tracks. Vermonters, by contrast, greet strangers with a wave and seem just waiting for the chance to strike up a conversation.

I don’t say this sentimentally. I am not always looking for a conversation. I say it ethnographically. Something beyond mere courtesy seems ambient in this little New England state. What is going on? One difference, I suppose, is that Vermont has very relaxed gun laws, while New York City makes it very difficult to be armed. That might put a Second Amendment premium on being nice to strangers on the rural byways, though I’ve never actually seen anyone walking around with an AR-15 or a holstered handgun.

A better explanation, perhaps, is that fear of random violence in Vermont is largely unknown. The murder rate in Rutland as of 2018 (latest figures) with a population of 15,300 was a whopping 0.0 percent. That will change in 2022. In June, Sincere Johnson, age 46, was shot to death in Rutland, and two suspects, Michael O’Brien (35) and Courtney Samplatsky (34), were apprehended on the lam after breaking into a post office in New Hampshire. Johnson, the victim, was black and from New York City; O’Brien and Samplatsky are white native Vermonters from a village near Rutland. Arresting detail: in their heavy-lidded mugshots, O’Brien and Samplatsky both have Covid masks pushed below their chins. Murders, of course, are not unknown in Vermont, but they often seem to be connected with the drug trade recently imported from New York.