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.