This spring, I received a much-sought visa from Britain that allows me to apply for settlement in that nation after a total of three years of working and living there - as I have been doing off and on in recent years. Receiving it was an occasion for both celebration and sober reflection.
It represents an option to exit a United States I now barely recognize — one that almost daily distresses me with its xenophobia, its saber-rattling, its theocratic leanings, its denial of facts and science, its tribalism, and its petty and boorish president. I think of that visa as my “Trump card.