I came here as the ideal starry-eyed immigrant kid three years ago. The country was riding off Biden’s victory into a tightly contested midterm election. I was in a progressive space for the first time in my life, where who or what I am was celebrated rather than demeaned and spat on. The blue wave would continue forever, surely.

I’m an artist, coming from a country where artists are killed or harassed into toning down their work if it crosses some arbitrary social boundary. America was a fresh start for me, a chance to escape the dictatorships and corruption, the racism, xenophobic nationalism and surrender-to-the-authoritarian religious doctrines that had come to define much of my interaction with Pakistan’s political system.

There was no way that Trump would be back, right? I mean, he is so nakedly proud of everything detestable in a human being — openly corrupt, cartoonishly stupid, hungry for power and flagrantly contemptuous of the institutions that comprise this nation. He is all of those things, and he is loved for it. This is the death of the American Dream.

I watched the first presidential debate in mild paranoia as Biden sounded closer to a reanimated corpse than a presidential candidate. I breathed a sigh of relief when Kamala was announced as the new candidate: someone fresh and new and younger would bring life back into the fight against impending global fascism.

Her VP pick gave me more hope. With Walz’s hardline stance against the weirdness of Republicans and with her confidence and decisiveness, how could she lose?

Then things slowly started slipping away, and I tried to chalk it down to personal paranoia. Where was all the energy going? Why was she cowing to the same billionaires and regressives whose policies and beliefs she was supposed to fight against?

I write this on election night, not all the votes are in yet, but the outcome seems inevitable. It even seems as though he’s on track to win the popular vote. This is the death of the American Dream.

An art display that I put up that was about immigration, the election and a broken system was vandalized last week. It now seems unfair to punish the vandal. After all, she only enacted the will of the American electorate when she tore down and defaced an immigrant’s work, taking it upon herself to cleanse the space of the filth that she called ugly. Cleanse the space of that filth was a service to the good people of this country.

My city just closed down primary schools due to how bad pollution is. Millions of kids do not have an education because of climate change, slowly choking on toxic air. It doesn’t matter. Hundreds of thousands are slaughtered by forces with US Support or they will be slaughtered without US Support. It doesn’t matter. Vigilantes are empowered to enact “justice” on those who do not look or act like them. It doesn’t matter. The greatest democracy the world has ever seen collapses with the approval of tens of millions. It doesn’t matter. This is the death of the American Dream. 

I grew up idolizing America in a weird postcolonial way. The clothes, the culture, the freedom, the diversity and love for all things in the world. That was the American Dream for me. I was a naive highschooler from across the world, applying to a middle-of-nowhere, out-of-the-way college that was too cold and overwhelming and all the things that I never thought it would be but came to love anyways.

As James Baldwin said, love has never been a popular movement. There is a space for grieving the losses that have happened and the hardships that stare us down (see above). Wars, hunger, inequity, our fellow humans and climate change are all challenges to be overcome.

We may not win any of these fights. We may lose most of them even, but to surrender in the face of it is to give in to the anti-human death cult that says that genocide and death and hate and discrimination are preferable to a world of peace, co-existence and love. The levers of power have been given to those who would abuse them and hurt untold numbers of us. This is the death of the American Dream, but it is not the end.

We have each other, we always have had each other. Our leaders are not the sole drivers of safety and change. They only win as long as we stop fighting for our rights, our safety and our communities. It will be a long period ahead of chaos, unrest and exhaustion. Not just for America but for the world. There are people in your lives now who are more scared than they have ever been, the immigrants amongst us, the queerfolk, the women, the minorities who have known the worst excesses of the past and are well aware of what the future is.

Despair is lovely and all, but there is a point where I have to keep living. We have to keep living and waking up each morning and doing a little bit more to make the world a better place. Organizing, protesting, posting, talking, building relationships, remembering, learning, listening and knowing that things are not okay and really never have been okay and that change is hard-fought and easily lost but still fighting for that change every day until it happens: these things will all keep us together while  we weather the literal and metaphorical storms that batter at us. 

There is no savior. There is nobody coming to rescue us. There is no way we all wake up tomorrow, and find that it was all some Dream that we can move on from and forget. This is the death of the American Dream, but it is not the end. We will wake up tomorrow, to a world fraught with hatred and injustice. And then we’ll wake up the day after that too.