Oratory/Expos - Stories

A very nice talk from TED by Chris Abani on storytelling and the importance of stories. This would be a great topic for someone to write an oratory about. The importance of telling the stories so that we can learn from them. For Hawaii, where I live, this is importnat because the stories that are not told are lost. For a family, it's equally so, how did you come to be. Joe Galloway, a reporter in Vietnam used to tell a story about how his great-grandparents had met in a shoe store because each one of them had lost a leg in the civil war, so they would meet and buy a pair of shoes together. More recently the stories of the history of the British Empire in the Middle East could have told us a great deal about how stupid American expectations about Iraq were. The stories of our lives are our history and when we forget them, we forget ourselves. when we refuse to tell them because we think it might be painful to hear or painful to tell, we rob others of their history. Remember that the root word of history is STORY and that story should be told.