I intended to write about immigrants. About our government’s demonization of immigrants. About the reasons people flee their homes, abandon their extended families and communities, take enormous risks and suffer humiliating hardships to get to some safer and healthier place. I wanted to talk about some of the people in this portrait collection who are from immigrant families—like Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, like Carlos Munoz, Jr., like Channapha Khamvongsa, like Ai-jen Poo, like Dr. Bernard Lown, like Gladys Vega, like Emma Tenayuca and Shirley Chisholm. I wanted to expound on the gifts they have made to all Americans. Great, justice-seeking immigrants, by virtue of simply being immigrants, are labeled today as criminals, rapists, and only found worthy of disposal in the great American deportation dumpster. The policy is: take their labor, demonize them, discard their bodies, erase their memory. 

Unless you are a racist, or had your perception blinded by fear, or are worried that people of color are becoming a majority in the U.S., you see the characterization of immigrants as people unworthy of dignity, unworthy of humanity, unworthy of anything but negative stereotyping as a sentiment that makes all the rest of us unworthy of our own humanity. Just as support for the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza makes us unworthy of our humanity.

And, anyway, in a country of immigrants, isn’t the premise that America is only for Americans absurd? Immigrants are as American as apple pie, as American as Spanish-speaking low-wage workers. But I don’t want to write about immigrants now. I want to focus on a different question.

The first question to put to our government is not, “Who gets to live here?” The first question is, “What are you doing to ensure that life will go on here? What measures are you taking to ensure the long-term health of our environment so that people may enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in perpetuity?” The correct answer to that question is not “eradicating pollution by immigrants.”  And since we know that a healthy environment supports the health of millions of other plants and animals, the next question is, “How are you making sure that all the essential ecosystems that allow us and all species to thrive are being protected?”

The very first portrait in the Americans Who Tell the Truth project was the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman. His quote begins: “This is what you shall do, love the earth, the sun, and the animals.” That’s not a catchy phrase, it’s a commandment.

Every aspect of our lives begins with the fundamental acknowledgement that our flourishing continuity depends on obeying that commandment. Tell me, have you ever heard Trump say anything—anything!—positive about the importance of any other life form? His exalted sense of power begins with his power over other lives and his right to exploit them. He has no idea what makes clean water, clean air and a healthy environment. The entitled mega-rich think their entitlements include clean air and water no matter how much they profit by polluting them.  Trump considers environmental regulations a hindrance to economic prosperity. He and, as far as we know, everyone in his administration would flunk a fourth-grade science test on the maintenance of an ecosystem. What I’m saying is not amusing—a joke about ignorant, narcissistic politicians. It is, in fact, a criminal charge. Any person who attains his degree of power, who fails to understand the necessity of a healthy environment, who fails to act to mitigate climate change, has committed treason against the future of life on this planet. All life. Period.

Trump’s superiority to, and ignorance of, the laws of nature make life itself an endangered species. The planet cries out to be rid of him and his fascist coterie of cruel, self-indulgent, sycophantish, greedy oligarchs. The Americans Who Tell the Truth project imagines and works for the Common Good, for justice, equality, and a thriving future for all life—a goal at odds with the continuation of Trump. Ask the right question, and dedicate yourself to the right answer. You may just save the world.