A Narnian Approach to the State of the Union

Battling a sinus bug, I have been doing more couch-sitting than usual this weekend, and my inert pursuits included watching The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and reading Laurie Fabiano's Elizabeth Street. While one deals with the exploits of children rescuing Narnia and the other with the moving true story of Italian immigrants beginning life in New York City in the early 1900s, both surprisingly reinforce the danger of dwelling on what might have been.

In Prince Caspian, Lucy searches for Aslan and asks him if lives could have been saved if she had looked for him sooner. He replies:

“To know that would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that. But anyone can find out what will happen. If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell that you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me—what will happen? There is only one way of finding out.”

Elizabeth Street's main characters, a close-knit family of Italian immigrants, face deaths from construction mishaps, mob kidnappings ignored by corrupt police, and appaling living conditions in tenements. But unlike Lucy, they do not bother asking what might have been. They simply go on with their lives, through tragedy and hardship, starting over again and again in single-minded determination that their children will have better lives, that they will not have to 'scrape plaster from the wall to mix with the flour.'

The sense of looking to the future without dwelling on what might have been could better serve our generation than our typical reaction of passing blame as we face looming specters of swelling national deficits, stagnant employment, and weak economic growth. As a New York Times opinion article points out, 'it takes years' to make changes. But the only way to find a solution, is to look forward, trying solutions and seeing what happens. Simply wondering what might have been will get us nowhere.

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

"All I'm saying is simply this: that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be - this is the interrelated structure of reality.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... And then he goes on toward the end to say: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution."

- Martin Luther King, Jr - Commencement address for Oberlin College

Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. day. More than a bank holiday, it is a celebration of what Dr. King stood for: unity of humanity, fought for through peace. Today I don't really have anything to say; King's words speak for themselves, more powerfully then I could ever hope to reword them.

While I am not what I should be, and you are not what you should be, let us take hope in God, and take hope that King's message will continue to be heard and remembered.