So What's the Story?

Every story has a back story and a side story. Sometimes we don’t need to hear it as when a friend told of a fall she took and the woman coming to her aid felt it necessary to first tell how she happened to be there at that particular moment on her way to visit her ailing sister who recently moved. Just please call 911, my friend interrupted. I can imagine how 911 operators must get antsy having to put up with meta-narratives.

Just the facts, Ma’am, Sargent Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet.

My deaf daughter once got a speeding ticket. She challenged it and when the judge noted her hearing loss he started into an empathetic story of his neighbor who was likewise impaired. Never one to ingratiate herself at the right time my daughter spoke over the judge and said, I don’t care about your neighbor, I’m here to talk about my ticket.

Jokes are small stories as when the guy walks into a bar and says….but not all stories are jokes. Innocent A must avenge the killing of his brother, B, by murdering C who is then wiped out by D.

The Greeks invented gods for the full range of human behavior, from Nemesis to Hubris. In the classic family squabble Agamemnon, the father, sacrifices his daughter as instructed by the goddess, Artemis, and is in turn murdered by his wife who gets rubbed out by her son along with sister, Electra, his accomplice.  Her grief extended only to her father’s death and mourning became her. Her version of the tale arbitrarily began with her mother’s revenge never questioning what led her mother to such rage. The house was cursed, as we all are, with the capacity for inflicting hurt to answer some cry from a primitive place within.

We each pick up the narrative at the point which serves us best. As if the attack on the World Trade Center had no antecedents. Or the recent crash of the stock market or any other historical event. 

He started it, I probably yelled to my mother, when I shoved my brother after he had whacked me. But his grievance was likely festering since he lost his status as an only child. I never got around to apologizing for having been born.

We think in terms of narratives. Washington had a good one as did Abe Lincoln who is said to have built the log cabin he was born in. Trump has a great story of the self-made man. Too bad he fabricated the entire thing.

My window into the socio-political world reveals a chronicle of steady social progress, starting with FDR in 1933 and moving even through the Carter-Nixon years up until 1980. Since Reagan there’s been a systematic dismantling of government’s role. Soon, it seems, we’ll be back to square one. But square one began long before Roosevelt into the Gilded Age with greed as our creed, through the Federalist Papers, the Enlightenment, back to Marcus Aurelius and probably the cave men. 

Stories don’t begin or end; they only stop to take a breath.