When justice is measured only in how it makes the powerful feel safe, then it was never justice. It was control.
It was 1844, in a quiet little town.
At 2 a.m., a man broke into a ranch. Guns in hand. He knew the family’s habits. He had studied them. He waited until the night swallowed them whole—drunk, asleep, defenseless.
And that’s exactly how he found them.
No real resistance. Just confusion, half-dreams, and screams that barely left the throat.
Men, women, and children—all killed before the sun had a chance to rise.
The town was horrified.
The newspapers ran out of adjectives to describe the savagery. The sheriff mobilized. Men gathered their horses. And not long after, they found the man—not really hiding. Just waiting.
Dragged back to town, the people demanded blood. He was a monster, they said. A killer of innocents. A savage who deserved to be hanged. And so, he was.
Justice, they called it.
A brutal act answered with a brutal punishment.
They slept better that night.
But the story doesn’t begin with the man breaking into that house.
The story began centuries before.
And for this man… it began just a decade ago.
Ten years before that night, he lived on that very land—with his wife, his children, and his community. That ranch? That “little town”? It was built on the bones of his ancestors.
They came—those who crossed oceans—not with peace, but with guns and flags. Not seeking cohabitation, but conquest. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t consider humanity.
They simply took.
His people had bows and arrows.
The invaders had rifles.
And when a bow meets a gun, it is never a fair fight.
What the newspapers didn’t print…
Was how his land was stolen.
How his family was slaughtered.
How he watched his world burned down—and was called a savage for daring to mourn it.
So, when he struck back, when he picked up the same tools, they once used against him, when he walked into that house with death in his hands—it wasn’t the beginning of a crime.
It was the echo of one.
But still, they told the story from where it suited them.
From the middle.
The part where they were hurt—not where they hurt first.
They wanted him to kill only the killer.
To spare the family of the man who didn’t spare his.
They demanded he remain civilized in the face of civilization’s cruelty.
This is how history has always been told.
The real victims turned into monsters.
The monsters painted as martyrs.
We’ve been taught to trust headlines without asking what’s behind them.
But I’ve learned to question every story that starts in the middle.
I’ve learned to fear the news that arrives in perfect synchronization—every outlet, every anchor, every word aligned—because that’s not information. That’s orchestration.
The story above is fictional.
And yet, it is also true.
It has happened over centuries.
And it is still happening now.
So next time you hear a story—on the news, in the paper, from a podium—ask yourself:
Where does this story begin? And who decided that was the beginning?
Because a story told from the middle will always sound like revenge.
But the full story?
That’s not revenge.
That’s history demanding to be heard.
And maybe—just maybe—the man with the bow was never the savage.
Maybe he was the last echo of a world we chose to erase.
Salima
Just thinking out loud over here