Requesting a 29-hour day

     I was on the phone with mom the other night, talking about the so-called Arab Spring – the flight of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and my refusal to let the media end the story there, and my even stronger refusal to give up on the people of Syria and Yemen and Bahrain (thank you, ladies and gentleman of the press, for completely abandoning that last one) – and I asked her if she thought 2011 might be the new 1968.
     “To be honest,” she said, “I still don’t feel like I was really there in 1968. I wasn’t involved enough, and I didn’t follow through.”
     I’m not sure how much justice she does herself there, but that matter aside, it got me thinking, as I do more and more these days, just how one should go about avoiding that; that is, how one gets involved, and how one follows through.
     I like to consider myself at least something of an activist, but the sheer enormity of the planet’s potential for revolution right now, if not the revolutions taking place already, make a somewhat intimidating prospect of where to best direct one’s energy.
     Spending my evenings peddling to massively overworked literary agents a manuscript concerning Islamophobia and gender conflict, two of the biggest problems facing our country right now, I can’t avoid the fantasy that I’m somehow acting to further a cause or two. Unfortunately, novels have a sporadic track record for effecting change, and when they do, in fact, manage to do so, it’s not the kind of change that lends itself to easy measurement. (Not to mention the fact that, in all fairness, I’m not sure I qualify as a novelist until one of these agents sees fit for my query letter a destination other than the recycling bin.)
     The implication, then, is that the real revolutionary work must rally from somewhere between my publishing ventures, my fifty hour work week, and the six hours of sleep I try to allow myself nightly, and the numbers leave little room to breathe.
     The capacity for mathematics to defeat one’s enthusiasm for changing the world is all too potent, but as history shows, the world doesn’t wait.
     To the revolutionaries of the planet: I’m applying for some extra hours.