A paranoid, a psychopath, a fascist, a narcissist and a murderer walked into a bar.

They played pool and darts and got drunk until they started fighting over who cheated but the fighting ended up eventually to be about who truly had the bigger biceps.

They drank some more and broke windows and chairs, attacked the bar person , put a bullet in the waiter’s head and burned down the entire place before driving away in their gun loaded trucks and vanished into the woods.

They found a peaceful land and each of them tried to claim it. They paid the poor villagers, trying to recruit them and brainwash them with hate speech and regressive ideologies. They convinced each and every one of them that the other group is made of haters that are waiting to attack their properties and families.

And so it happened that the peaceful village was not peaceful anymore.

The people got hooked on these dark ideas and got divided into war groups. This lasted for thirty long years. Thirty years after which villagers came out with no land, no cash, no property and no resources while stewards came out obscenely wealthy.

Most of the land workers had lost family or limbs. They all sat in despair looking at all that smoke and ashes but one day, when the wind of change started blowing, they were able to see each other, then talk to each other. They tried to remember their past lives and how it had all started.

And so it finally happened. The enraged villagers of all ages and genders, turned to the paranoid, the psychopath, the narcissist, the fascist and the murderer and tried to catch them and sentence them to death. But those mentally ill filth of men, had everyone caught in heavy chains and dared anyone to break it and risk breaking their neck with it.

Then the flame of mental illness shone even more and the filth remembered their biceps and their guns and started fighting again, while the villagers sat there in despair and kept watching.

The story might end here and it might not as no empire was ever proven stronger than the will of resistance. Until the last episode is written, traumatic events are being served on the table and the journey is full of terror.

Keep talking about my homeland and how a tiny land of green and blue colors was caught in the claws of mental illness, tyranny and greed and how it kept shouting out for freedom and dignity.

Photo by the great Lebanese caricaturist Pierre Sadek.