This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past 20 years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This work is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the US, as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.