We're not cognitively equipped to deal with it. And it's becoming a problem, frankly. It's part of the reason why I quit Facebook. We all hear these things and read reports about how our attention spans are shrinking. It makes me wonder about the generation growing up now, how it will affect their brain development.

On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.

I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.

The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.

I know well what faith really means to people in their daily lives, as there are many people in my family whose lives are permeated by their faith: it dictates the way they behave and sustains them in tough times, of which we've had too many lately.

All of which raises the question – your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like – a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?