!They're bombing again --- agk's diary 19 October 2023 @ 03:24 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 in bedroom while Evy sleeps --- 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.