It's crunch time, and every time I think of all the things I have to do before Wednesday I feel sick. This morning I went and saw the Chronicles of Narnia, which was a bad idea considering how much work I had, but it put me in a very sober mood which has been good for my productivity. I won't give anything away, but there is a part in the movie at the very beginning when the mother is sending her four children away from London to the countryside so that they'll be safe from the Luftwaffe, and they go to the train station to put the children on the train. Peter, the oldest boy, is about 16 or 17 at the time, he looks a little younger so I can't say, but the actor was about 17. His father left for the war some time ago and the only thing they have left of him is a photograph. They don't know whether or not he is still alive. He's walking through the train station and he sees another boy, about his age but a little older, wearing the uniform of a soldier.

You can see for just that instant the guilt and shame that surfaces in his mind... the feeling that he should be wearing that uniform too, that he should be fighting alongside his father for the future of England. Of course he can't, of course he must take care of his sisters and brother in the absence of his parents, and of course he's just a little too young... he can't break so many of these expectations at once and go and volunteer for the army. It might kill his mother outright, just the idea. But he feels it. The responsibility. So when he gets to Narnia and he is asked to fight a war that isn't his, when he sees how many are counting on him and how evil the enemy is, he must finally face this fear, this desire to run away from the fight which is somehow always muddled with responsibility he feels to take care of his family at home and to not risk making them suffer by recklessly getting himself killed.

It made me think about how different that generation was from ours. First of all, if Peter saw the soldier walking through the train station, he probably wouldn't feel guilty for not joining him. No one makes anyone feel guilty for not joining the army anymore. On the contrary, some people make others feel guilty for joining the army, as if they're being so stupid and careless and not thinking about their families just to run off and fight in some stupid and pointless war. I wonder if they would still feel that way if the Luftwaffe was dropping bombs on their houses? I wonder if it is a question of differing circumstances or differing world views that separates our generation from that one? But let us for a moment travel to Narnia. There, the forces of good and evil are caught up in a struggle that seems, on the surface, to have nothing whatsoever to do with the sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve. The war in Narnia is, as they say, "Not Our War". The children have many reasons to simply back out of the war and go home, as they may have were it not for Edmund. But in the end they had a choice, and they didn't back out. They stayed, because they saw the people that they were helping, they heard their cries for freedom, they saw the as the land through which they walked turned from a barren wasteland into a flowering forest from the sheer power of hope they brought with them. Even though it wasn't really their conflict, even though they had to risk their lives for people a world away whom they didn't know. Even though they had a million valid excuses.

So how different is Iraq from Narnia? Instead of a 100 year winter, they have suffered decades of war. Instead of ice there is sand, and scorching desert sun. Instead of a White Witch (who the good people of the Earth accidentally helped a long time ago out of kindness and naivete, by the way) there was a cruel dictator, who, instead of turning his subjects into stone, gassed them with deadly agents from which no lion's breath can return them to life. Many years have passed, and most people who come are quickly frightened away. The most the outside world has done is to stop the witch's progress at the lampost.
Now there we are, a shining light of hope amid this 100 year winter. Where we go we bring water to ease the drought, food to fight the famine, chocolate for the children, hope to cure the most insidious of all ailments: despair.
That does not mean that the whole country will welcome our coming. Many people threw their lot in with the queen long ago. For every fawn and centaur there is a snow tiger and an orge that chose the other side. Some of them may be misguided, some of them were tricked, no doubt. But many of them believe that their cause is just, and want nothing more than the death of hope and the return of winter in their land, no matter the cost.
So what is our role in all of this? Will we welcome the children home with harsh words and reprimands and tell them that there comes a time when a child must stop pretending and tell the truth? Will we welcome them back into our world as heros? Will we say, "Why fight a war in Narnia when there is a war right here in England?" Will we believe the White Witch when she tells us that she is the rightful ruler over Narnia and we have no place interfering? Will we believe the children when they tell us how much Narnia needs us? Will we accompany them there through the wardrobe at the risk of our own lives?

It's up to us, isn't it. It's always up to us. A simple decision, made in an instant:

What are you willing to die for?

So this conversation, coupled with my recent lamentings about graduate school and the course of my life in the years ahead, makes me feel like a worthless sack of nothing because I'm sitting here and other people are going out there and fighting for something that is worth fighting for. Things of that proportion don't happen very often in the field of Planetary Geology. Yeah, I have plenty of good excuses, but I know very well that if this were World War II and I was a boy, it would be expected of me to go Over There, and I would sign up right away. But nobody expects it at all, everyone rather doesn't expect it and would be quite upset if that's what I happened to go and do.

But the themes that that movie stirred up are old ones that live inside me all the time. It was a story of great courage and sacrifice and honor.

And nobody writes stories like that anymore.

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