Assailed by tiny enemies while giants wait in the wings

I woke up at 2 a.m. in a panic because I realized I'd forgotten to remind an advisee to add a particular class to his schedule. Not an emergency! Just an errant item from my to-do list haunting the midnight hours.

If I have to wake up alarmed in the middle of the night, why can't I panic over something actually worthy of panic, like extinction of species or melting of glaciers or a 12 percent increase in our health-care premiums? (Which our HR people prefer to call "contributions," as if we're donating our hard-earned funds to a worthy cause out of the goodness of our hearts instead of having them wrenched out of our paychecks kicking and screaming.)

But I digress. 

The problem, I think, is that my subconscious knows that there's no point jerking me out of a sound sleep to obsess over melting glaciers in Greenland because what could I possibly do about the problem? I've relegated too many big issues to the category I'd describe as I'm doing my best but this really requires larger societal change so what's the point of thinking about it at 2 a.m.?

Instead, my subconscious likes to alert me to smaller matters that I actually have some control over. Forgot to give proper advice to an advisee? Better get to it! Granted, emailing the student at 2 a.m. is unlikely to result in any immediate action, but at least it will get the problem off my back.

This reminds me of the problem we discussed in my Honors Literature class this morning, when we tackled the chapter of The Woman Warrior in which Maxine Hong Kingston examines the disconnect between fairy-tale heroics and real-life action. Fa Mu Lan sets out with her village's grievances inscribed in her flesh and she uses her skills and weapons to locate and destroy the oppressor. But her enemy is easily identified--he has a name and an address, and once he's dead, the village is free.

What happens when we can't identify the enemy? How do we locate an enemy who seems to suffuse the very air we breathe? If the enemy is an evil baron living in a castle, then break down the doors and chop off his head; but what if the enemy is racism or gender stereotyping or unjust economic systems? Where would you start chopping off heads and how would you know when you're done?

And so we sheath our swords and go to sleep, where we hope to build strength to fight the big battles but instead find ourselves assailed by little things that go bump in the night. Who can be a hero under these circumstances?