“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2022. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!’” “New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine … But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music,” Gonzalez writes. “I remember, the summer before I left for college, lying close to my bedroom box fan, taking it all in. Thanks to a partial scholarship (and a ton of loans), I was on my way to an Ivy League college … I didn’t yet know that you don’t live on an Ivy League campus. You reside on one. Living is loud and messy, but residing? Residing is quiet business.” At college, Gonzalez and her fellow minority students were admonished to quiet down. “In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy,” Gonzalez continues. “And in acquiescing, I accepted that.”
The rule was introduced in 2006, after a terrorist plot to detonate liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks on a series of transatlantic flights was uncovered.
