Regarding the May 16 Japan Pulse column headlined “Understanding the need to shame someone on social media for not exercising self-restraint during a pandemic,” I live in Jackson Heights in New York City — an epicenter of the coronavirus in the U.S.
I read with disbelief your article questioning the shaming of people who don't follow safety guidelines during this pandemic. To call noncompliance "not exercising self-restraint' is, well, outrageous. This isn't a matter of something like having too many highballs. This is a matter of endangering yourself and people around you — which in a pandemic means spreading the disease wide because all of you can then infect other people.
It is mind-boggling that anyone would object to trying every means to avoid people endangering other people. And to ask, as the writer does, that we "walk in the shoes" of the noncompliant, is to turn the situation on its cross-eyed head. Not to be caustic, but do your readers really deserve, under current circumstances, this kind of ignorant nonsense? More power to shaming!
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.