What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888—or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship—way down below steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children and, for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”

As a boy of 14, he had, my aunt reported, challenged the local rabbi where he lived to give him back some of the money his father had donated to the rabbi—money his mother had made and that they needed just to live. And when the rabbi refused, he evidently hit him and then ran away from home. The rest, as they say, is history.

I barely knew him. He died when I was about five years old and I have only the faintest memory of standing beside him, holding his hand, while he leaned on his cane. But in the end, he managed to turn that 50 cents into a business in Brooklyn, New York. He got clobbered in (but made it through) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even built a couple of buildings in Brooklyn that he named after my dad and Hilda. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about our strange Trumpian world today. After all, we’re on an increasingly disturbed planet, where, in some places, as the heat rises, the storms intensify, wildfires grow ever fiercer, sea levels rise, and... well, you get the idea... ever more people are finding that they simply can’t stay in their worlds anymore and migration of the sort my grandfather once engaged in is growing exponentially.

And President Donald J. Trump doesn’t like that one little bit. I have no doubt that, had he been president back in 1888, he would have wanted to chuck my grandpa, a wandering Jew from what’s now Ukraine, out on his ear.

And yet, you might also think of “our” president as a migration-causer extraordinaire. After all, whether he likes it or not, he is indeed the climate-change president. And give him credit, though he’s not the sun (not faintly), he certainly has proven himself distinctly capable of upping the heat in this world of ours exponentially and I don’t just mean by doing everything he can under the (yes!) sun to deny that climate change is even happening. Of course, he’s labelled it a “con job“ and claimed its potential threat to our health is a “scam.”

What he’s attempting to do on (and to) this planet of ours will, in the not-at-all-distant future, prove to be a disaster of an almost unimaginable sort—from trying to increase the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, to interfering in plans to use wind and solar power. In doing so, of course, he’s also turning our future over to that other great imperial power of the........

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