Maggie McCann || April 15th, 2020
We learned about the WWII mass observation journals that these COVID journals are based on in class today. It was jarring, unsettling, fascinating, I never could have imagined a few months ago that I would be in a time even remotely like WWII and here I am personally understanding a journal written by a girl in 1939. I found this project incredibly fascinating when I first started and the thought that one day my journal may be in a collection like the mass observation journals were reading is unbelievable. I was writing some of these journals yesterday before reading the WWII journals for class and having everything so fresh and seeing all the similarities was incredibly unsettling and made this whole situation seem much bigger.
The WWII journals we read were written by a girl named Muriel Green, she was 18 in 1939 living in Norfolk. She mentions the depressiveness of businesses not being what they used to be, like all the stores closing at the beginning of the pandemic. She also writes about rationing, and as were not rationing yet this is definitely a bit worse than we have it we are seeing echoes of that today, the shortages in supermarkets, the hesitation to even go to supermarkets. And I feel I have to keep reiterating, this is absolutely not as bad as the second world war, I’m not sure there are many things that could be worse than atrocities of the second world war but reading civilian journals, seeing the war from a far, it feels a lot like what were going through now.
There was also a bit of the journals that discussed Muriel going to a meeting in the city. At this point civilians had been given gas masks in order to protect themselves from the tear gas that was constantly covering city streets. Muriel mentions that her and others were holding their gas masks but at the risk of seeming too over dramatic they were not putting them on, the gas subsided and they continued on without them until she got to the meeting where they were hit with a room full of tear gas. No one had worn their gas masks as directed and because of this they all got hit with tear gas very badly, Muriel even writes “I suppose it was a case of feeling ‘silly’ to put one on when other people had not got theirs on” sounds eerily familiar doesn’t it? Everyone dismissing face masks and gloves to avoid seeming over dramatic, until it was too late.