On Thursday, March 2nd I headed up to a meeting with my fellow social justice group member Spencer to talk have an insightful conversation on Trump’s executive orders and what we can do about it. The meeting was held up on 125th street and was held by city councilman Mark Levine. I had gotten an email about this upcoming meeting and told my group about it. Unfortunately only Spencer and I were able to go but we still had a great time and learned a lot. When I got there it was fully packed and Spencer had gotten me a seat with him. The meeting had a panel arranged full of experts on different topics that Mark Levine had gotten to come. One of the experts was from the organization that Spencer and I had worked with in the past called We Act for environmental justice. I had also met up with another member of We Act named Bailey, we had worked with him in the past and had become friends. He even told us about an upcoming climate march that would be taking place in May and down in D.C. When the expert from We Act started to talk I took some notes down on what he said. Here are some of my notes, one of Trump’s first laws was allowing coal companies to disregard streams and clean water act. That law allowed big companies to disregard all safety precautions that kept communities safe and without that law now low income more diverse communities would be affected and might not even have clean water anymore. Also, Trump’s tower is less clean that 95% of other towers in NYC. This meant that Trump was actually one of the most people to pollute my city and he may say that he is working to fix other people’s pollution problem without even addressing his own. Another thing is that Trump is trying to cut the EPA (environmental protection agency) from 16,000 staff to 12,000 staff when the EPA was already understaffed int he first place. This means that Trump is trying to take one of the largest agencies that are supposed to protect our environment and make it less sufficient. This may have to do with the fact that Trump knows that it costs more for these large companies to stop polluting and he wants to make it so that these companies don’t have to pay anymore and can just do what they want freely. Those are just some of the notes that I took about Trump and what he is doing today. Something that I learned from this is that people try to cover up what they do and try to make it seem like they are pushing for cleaner healthier things when in fact if you look at the facts he is actually trying to make it easier to pollute our earth. Another thing that I would take away from this is that people in power aren’t always great and they can be wrong too. Just because Donald Trump is the president does not mean that he is right on everything, most of the time he isn’t and he gets called out on it. It is important to not always just listen to people in power but to have your own ideas too.