COVID versus World War II
Twitter as storyteller and fact-based advocate.
It tends to a get a bad rap these days. But we recently challenged ourselves to try and use Twitter for a better and higher purpose than has often been the case recently. In particular, we’re attempting to tackle the thorny issue of the sacrifices we have all been asked to make in the face of the implacable enemy of COVID19.
We started with the idea of how what we are being asked to do compares to the sacrifices made by other generations when faced with similar, global calamaties. World War II was the first thing which came to mind both in terms of its impact and it’s scale. However, to avoid a comparison of the two conflicts — which is comparing two really incomparable events — we chose to focus on the progress of the disasters on a day-by-day basis and the impact to ordinary citizens.
We finally settled on the idea of a Twitter feed called COVID versus World War II which has an incredibly simple premise: what day are we at in relation to when the global pandemic was declared (March 11th, 2020) and what happened in World War II on the same day in relation to the start of conflict (September 1st, 1939). With each tweet — there’s typically only one per day — we provide a link to a newspaper article from that day in World War II — all links furnished by Newspapers.com. That’s it. We don’t try and spin the article in any particular way. We leave the interpretation of these tweets to the reader.
Given our locale, we are for the most part linking Canadian newspapers from the period but will occasionally feature articles from US- and UK-based publications. Note that we are not attempting to cover the big, earth-shattering developments of World War II (@RealTimeWWII already does an excellent job along these lines) but rather to find the stories of ordinary citizens being asked — and being willing — to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Beyond that angle, we provide these links without comment with the hope that readers will simply be given pause to think about whatever they’re being asked to do with respect to COVID19 and compare it to what our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did in the past. We encourage you to reach your own conclusions.
We invite you to follow @COVIDvWorldWar2 and let us know how we did.
