!They're bombing again
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agk's diary
19 October 2023 @ 03:24 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
in bedroom while Evy sleeps
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Weather changed. Chilly. Leaves tangled reds,
yellows, browns, thin on the branch, litter the
ground. Flat tire on truck bike from wheel truing
mistake.
That's not why I'm tired.
Took forty interested 7th-graders in a cave. Twelve
to thirteen years old. Taught human history of cave
modification, natural history of acid water remov-
ing limestone along fissures, depositing flowstone
once more basic. Showed cave map, taught projection
and cross-section, a year's labor to measure a cave
for a map. Encouraged exploration, imagination.
Evy organized and led an Amtrak advocacy strategy
meeting last weekend. I presented our approach and
secured commitments for work in two more counties.
We looked at the tracks and imagined a future.
I'm tired, though, because it never leaves my
thoughts that the Israeli army is implementing the
final solution in its Gaza concentration camp. I
wish I could stop it.
Friends rode Red Crescent ambulances during the
2003 Al-Aqsa intifada, told me about cavitation and
fragmentation patterns of Israeli bullets. One
assessed our friend as she died of Israeli Army-
inflicted spinal injury, rushed another friend to
hospital care for his untreatable Israeli Army
sniper-inflicted brain injury.
Later, in 2008, 2015, 2021, US and British friends
and my Israeli girlfriend tried to protect West Bank
olive groves and schools, farmers and children from
demolition, uprooting, casual murder by settlers.
Then they spoke up in their families, schuls, local
governments, organizations.
In 1989 a dear and recently dead friend worked with
popular medical committees in the first intifada.
Now Israel drops 6000 bombs in a day, kills all
members of families, destroys a big urban hospital,
negotiates and announces death or second Nakba as
their plan for all 2.3 million Gazans.
My country moved two aircraft carrier groups nearby
with attendant subs, frigates, Poseidon planes, 3
fighter wings, 12 fighters each, amphibious assault
flotilla of 2500 marines, 11 C-17 lifts to Israel,
25 F15-Es, 25 A-10s to Jordan, thousands of troops
already on bases in Iraq and Syria. Preparation for
regional war: maybe under Gazan genocide's cover
try to assassinate Assad again, try again to push
Russian military support out of Syria.
Arab, Persian countries draw closer. Most of the
world's hostile to genocidal settler-colonialism.
Israel and my country threatened to sabotage the
peace and coup him when Colombia's president said
these obvious, humane words:
"The only way for Palestinian children to sleep in
peace is for Israeli children to sleep in peace.
The only way for Israeli children to sleep in
peace is for Palestinian children to sleep in
peace. War will never achieve this."
I wish I could do something, protect somebody,
demilitarize. I've been in dusty streets around
pancaked buildings, dead bodies in heat and cold. I
cleaned crush and amputation wounds, packed a dead
baby in a shoebox, asked teammates to try to find a
morgue. I tried to get rice, drinking water through
a blockade. I had the luxury to go home. My family
lived.
My mind's nose smells Gaza, ear hears it, mouth's
dry for it, muscles sore, sleep disturbed. I go to
work, raise my child, present about trains, teach
kids about caves, but part of me's in Gaza and part
in prayer. God, have mercy.
