Narrative

I'm so fascinated by this concept of narrative. Everything is a narrative. History is a narrative. Even if everything you tell is absolutely true, you still have a storyline and you tell the stories that fit it.

For example, I was listening to an interview with a man who lives in Northern Israel and works for mainstream media (he didn't say which channel). Since the war started he's been living in Tel Aviv. At one point his media outlet asked him to write an article about families (like his) who'd evacuated their homes up north. He found ten families who agreed to be interviewed, but of course each family had a different opinion about the situation. He was told to pick the family who was most outspoken against the government and was not planning on going back to their home.

So see? There are all sorts of stories out there, but this media outlet has a narrative saying that the people in the north are unsafe and it's all the government's fault, so that's the story they chose to publish. 

But I don't want to do that. I'm going to try to write down all the war stories as I've heard them and I hope that anyone reading this can appreciate that people are complicated. Stories are neither good nor bad, they just are.