Todays stories will become tomorrow’s fairytales 

Once upon a time…

There was a great disturbance in the land. A mighty king looked around and he saw his kingdom burning.  His daughter, the princess, was with child and with her mother fled the kingdom in search of a safe place to give birth.

Does this conjure up images of knights on horseback and princesses in carriages and soldiers donning armor while wielding swords against foes?

If not, that’s okay. You don’t need your imagination. Just glance at international headlines:

I'm a bad, bad man

For there are tales in the news today that are the sort of stories that one later day inspire fairytales.

Today’s History, Tomorrow’s Legends

     How the Princess Escaped Into The Night

Imagine a princess about to give birth, forced to flee from her “castle” before enemy soldiers stormed it. Well, that would be “Princess” Aisha Gadhafi. After leaving her castle in a military convoy, she gave birth in Algeria. Her child carries the sins of his father. Born an exile, his birthright will be lost before he takes his first step. Princess Aisha, who served as part of Saddam Hussein’s defence team, has seen kings fall.

The Purity of a Queen

Imagine the “Queen” Safia, looking down at her daughter and her grandchild. Imagine the serious look in her eyes, with the gravity that only a Queen can convey.

Imagine the story-teller, born a hundred years from  now, who will tell the story of Queen Safia. He might make her a heroine for enduring so many years of her husband’s terror. “Safia means pure,” the story-teller will say, “In spite of her husband’s evil, Safia  preserved her purity and for that Allah blessed and protected her offspring.”

     The Poor Village Boy

Imagine the poor boy, not yet old enough to understand the significance of what he is witnessing. For years, he looked from his poverty in the outskirts of Tripoli towards Gadhafi’s palace. Suddenly he sees his parents huddling together and he knows something has changed. Now the clouds of dust from the dirt road seem intermingled with tension. But his thoughts can’t articulate what is different.  Imagine him in an abandoned road watching mouth open as a military convoy storms past his house. He won’t utter a word of this until his grandchildren are born.

     The Peasant

Imagine remote farmers in their fields, so disconnected from the world that it doesn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter what happens,” One tells his son “Whatever happens in the big cities never has made a bit of change for us.”

But the boy feels his father’s voice tremble; he can hear that his father is uneasy and afraid. He notices how his father paces through long hours of the night. And when the boy sleeps he dreams of joining the rebel army and fighting for freedom.

       A Time For Looking Out of Windows

So much of war is waiting and hoping. War is silence punctuated with flashes of terror. Right now in Libya people are waiting. They are looking out of their windows. They are up in their bedrooms. They are praying to Allah that their sons and husbands will return.

     All the Kings Men

Imagine Gadhafi’s mid-level of leadership. Think about how they are praying to Allah for guidance. Their whole lives they were forced to be loyal or face death. Now for the first time they have a choice — stay loyal and go down with the regime, or align with the rebels and fight for a better future.

     Hindsight’s Easy Choice

Making a decision is the same as rolling dice. It’s hard to know where to bet when they are daily fed Gadhafi-propaganda. Some of their hearts beats with the nervous certainty that Gadhafi will have a great fall and all the kings horses and all the kings men won’t be able to put it back together again.

Pirates know when men are off to war, treasure is left inside unlocked chests.

Pirates

As a people fight against their ruler, there are buccaneers who see opportunities to rush in and plunder the country’s treasure. These marauders are also called American Oilmen and according to CNN Money, in Libya they have “ emerge[d] from a line of idling black Mercedes sedans”.

Perhaps one day an American story-teller will tell the tale of a different kind of valiant knight — one fighting against dragons with names like Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, and Amerada Hess — beasts so large that an army of knights and new ideas was needed to bring them all down.

     Will Today’s News Become Tomorrow’s Tales? 

Perhaps this tale well never be told this way. Maybe fairytales as they once were born and repeated are a thing of the past. Perhaps now with the instantaneity of wireless, white-haired story tellers are a thing of our fairytales themselves. And tomorrow a grandfather —  illuminated by candle light and surrounded by young, hopeful faces —  tells the story of a day when people told stories of past realities, that with time, bled into our imaginations.

THE END

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THE FUTURE