I'm a prisoner, condemned to die.

My crime? I organized the first armed resistance against our government. For generations, it's encouraged pogroms against our minority. We just endured them, fearing to provoke worse. Worse than what? Already slow genocide.

Our new resistance has been effective--killed the militia and officials who attacked us. Even now, I've been legally appealing my execution as long as I can not out of any hope of rescue, but just to live long enough to learn the results of our biggest raid yet, across town. With luck, the government will pay for my death a hundredfold--and hesitate to risk that cost again.

My last words: "This is a war, a genocidal war your regime started, and I'm a prisoner of that war. Execute me, a prisoner of war, and you just ensure that we will execute you, too. Until you honor the rules of war, expect to be treated as you treat us. Expect to die."

I have no guilt about killing their cops, soldiers and politicians; they slaughtered us for centuries without fear of consequences. Now they'll hesitate. If not from conscience, from fear.

I don't fear death much. Had I not resisted, they'd have killed me anyway. To me, every day's my last day, and always was. The war's just two-sided now.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Guiltless killing: I was raised Gandhian, so this attitude is a shock. But not a mystery. I'm fighting long-term Lyme disease. Has radical pacifism biased me toward managing illness, not fighting back? Not any more.
• Doomed but defiant: 1: I just read Phyllis Gotlieb's novella Son of the Morning; a time-traveler urges a shtetl to fight back against the pogroms, hoping to forestall the Holocaust. Gotlieb implies pacifism can at times worsen genocide by convincing killers they're safe. Fighting back, even if doomed, makes pogroms riskier. 2: President Obama's assassinations by drone! My dream sides with Malala Yousafzai, the teen activist who warned Obama that drone killings just brutalize all sides. If Obama kills civilians, why shouldn't they retaliate in kind? Here I experience firsthand the bleak brutal calculus of those with nothing left to lose.
• PERSONAL ACTION: continue the herbs I've been taking, endure the indigestion they cause. My current symptoms are the price of a life-or-death fight. [LATER NOTE: this interpretation was confirmed by next night's dream, Eye of Tooth, in which revolutionary Pancho Villa prescribed a powerful herb, wormwood, to sterilize an infection.]
• POLITICAL ACTION: urge Obama to limit his drone program. Malala's right.

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