So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.
And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?
The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.
Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.
That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!
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“I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist, I'm Arab, and I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing.
And when someone dies, news travels fast. Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today.
Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war.
Israel is not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts. These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made.
I'll start with Sadi Mansour. Sadi was the director of Al-Quds News Network, and he posted a 22-second video on November 18. That was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage.
Sadi's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the Internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues.
He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes,
‘Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home. We were really sad.
I kept telling the kids, Look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you.
Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kapse? Bring your friends with you, it's okay.
And give Azeez the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha ha ha.
I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad.
Okay, I love you. Bye.’
A few hours after he shared that letter, Sadie and his co-worker Hassouna Saleem were at Sadie's home, when they were killed by an Israeli air strike that hit his house.
His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived.
Gaza is tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people. Like with Brahim Lafi.
Brahim was a photojournalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7. He was just 21, still new to journalism.
On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist.
Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Brahim from his co-worker Rushdie Sarraj. In this photo, Brahim staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young.
The caption reads, My assistant is gone. Brahim is gone. Rushdie himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker.
And I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Brahim. I read the tribute post to him too.
I saw this over and over again. Journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them.
And then the pattern continues.
Thank you.
Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists later in the war who had become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos. And those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true.
One video like that was posted by Ayat Hadduro. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range from what I can tell, interviews about women in politics.
She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera. Once the war started, Ayat's pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages.
On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is. It's scary.
‘This is likely my last video. Today, the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lahya area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky, ordering everyone to evacuate.
Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go.
But everyone else has evacuated. They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary.
What's happening is so tough, and may God have mercy on us.’
She was killed later that day.
Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime. So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by the Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases.
And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings. When we reached out to the IDF for comments, they said, quote, the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists. That's the answer they always give in these situations.
Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza. Journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting.
It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure.
Thank you.
The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdullah, because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine.
I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes, and I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago. He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut. I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a sperm freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself.
I know, ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot. Right after we said cut and started to rap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it, and no one could stop laughing.
It was a really good day that felt good to remember and to remember him that way. Issam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing.
He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war.
A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video. The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the AFP, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalists before the IDF shot at them.
The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. I had only met Issam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died. I know that he understood the risks of his job, but somehow it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet, and a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field.
I find myself thinking about him all the time. His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter Shereen Abou Aql who had been killed by the IDF. When I first saw that post in October, I thought how ironic because a week later, Isam also was killed by the IDF.
But then, after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become. I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long.
A tweet from reporter Al-Abdallah that quoted Sylvia Plath. It read, What ceremony of wars can patch the havoc? I'm going to keep going down the list, even though this story is over now.
Just for myself. My own way of bearing witness. Which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do.”
—DANA BALLOUT, The 95. Dana sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. Dana is a Lebanese-American, Emmy-nominated documentary producer.
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how does one cope when mid-way through they realize they are writing a tragedy and there is no possibility of a happy ending? especially when that was not the original intention? i'm absolutely gutted by this realization and i hate that i feel wedded to it.
Upset Because Story Went Off the Rails
You're a Writer, Not a Marionette - Long ago, I bought into the believe that characters and stories have minds of their own... that it was beyond my control if my character did X when I wanted them to do Y... that there was nothing I could do if my happy meet-cute story decided to be a dark tale of horror. It can be kind of fun (and freeing, honestly) to believe we're just helpless vessels through which some greater storytelling force speaks, but that's not the case at all. There's no magical entity pulling the strings beyond your control. If your character does X and you wanted them to do Y, you did that, not your character. If your happy meet-cute turns into a tragic horror, you did that, not your story. You're the writer, and you're in control of everything that does or does not happen in your story.
Does It Make the Story Better? - Human brains are incredible things, and sometimes when your character does X when you intended for them to do Y, it's because some part of your brain realizes that's the better choice. Maybe it's more believable or more natural. Maybe it just works better with what you're laying out. Maybe it's just more interesting. So, the trick is to look at the unintended thing that happened and ask yourself if it makes the story better. Make a list of pros and cons... what are the ways the story is better if you stick with X rather than Y. What are the ways it's worse? Ultimately, if the change truly makes the story better, it's worth following through.
Beware of Story Parasites - Parasites are organisms that invade and thrive inside a host organism, at the host organism's expense. When you're writing your WIP and it takes a massive shift in tone, genre, or direction, sometimes that's because a whole new story idea has bullied its way into this one and is now feeding off this story to survive. If the unintended thing doesn't make the story better and leaves you feeling upset about the direction things are heading, you've probably got a story parasite. In which case, the best thing you can do is write the idea down as generally as possible, and set it aside to work on another time. Treating this invasive idea as something distinct from your WIP can help you move on and keep your story on its intended path.
What To Do When the Change Has to Stay - Very rarely, you may find that story's original direction just isn't working, and that this new (and vastly different) direction makes for a much better story. In that case--if you're absolutely certain this is the right path--it's worth making a list of all the reasons this idea will be better. Try to imagine what the story will be like if you stick with the original plan, versus if you make the drastic change. Can you think of anything that excites you about this new idea? Can you find reassurance in the many ways that this story shines versus the original idea?
Ultimately, It's Up to You - If your story takes an unexpected and upsetting turn, and you're certain it's the superior course, and that there's no point in pursuing the story's original path instead, it's worth really taking a look at why it's so upsetting if it's the right thing to do. If you're disappointed that your original plan didn't work out, spend some time trying to figure out how to make the original plan work better than the new idea. If you're upset because this idea is too personal or triggering, set it aside and see if you can come back to it later. You're not obligated to keep working on a story if it shifts in a direction that makes you unhappy or uncomfortable. You can set it aside or figure out a way to keep it in your comfort zone.
I hope that helps!
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