But by the middle of the Reagan administration, the romance had gone out of that kind of law-breaking and resistance. A program launched in Boston in 1983 urged citizens to inform on any suspicious-looking neighbors. They might, after all, be drug dealers. “Drop a dime, stop a crime,” the billboards read, a dime being what it cost to make a call to the local police station from a public phone booth.
50 years from now, if history books are still being written and I'm still alive to read them, I wonder if I'll open one to find a similar note about 2020 and COVID-19.
