I was trying to remember how it was when the World Trade Centre towers were hit five years ago; before we had the terms like “9/11” or “the War on Terror” in our vocabulary, when my co-workers and I stood in the canteen at work and watched the little tv in the corner not really understanding what we were seeing. On the day that it happened it was more about who it was happening to. Since then it has slowly become about who was behind it and the response and the blame and the war. In my random searching I found The 2996 Project.
It was set up by blogger DC Roe and his idea was to assign each of the 2996 victims who died during the attacks, either on the planes or at the towers, to different bloggers who would find out all they could about their assigned person and write a memorial for them. More than 3ooo bloggers have signed up and a list of the participants with links to their posts can be found here. The instructions were for the bloggers to stay away from talking about the terrorists or the reasons behind the attacks and mostly they do. There’s a huge diversity of information, some people were easy to eulogise while others had little more than a photo and a job description to remember them by. There’s a lot of talk of them being heroes who died for their country but I’m struck more by how ordinary they all were.
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