The book began as a love letter to his son, and grew into a love letter to democracy. “Never before had I felt so equidistant, so vacillating, between the increasingly unrecognizable place called life and the suddenly intimate and expanding jurisdiction called death,” Raskin wrote in his book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy.” The very next day his father found himself taking cover during the worst attack on the American seat of democracy since the War of 1812. 31, 2020, 25-year-old Tommy Raskin took his own life. One actually wrote: “I was looking for a condolence card for the loss of your son which also said ‘and thanks for saving our country too’, but Hallmark apparently doesn’t make those.Email: July 28, 2022) The cold facts of any death never tell the true story. Congressman Jamie Raskin on the day democracy almost crumbled in the US: Politics Weekly podcastĮventually Raskin was convinced to write one letter for everyone sending condolences, one for everyone who wrote about impeachment and a third for everyone who offered condolences and political solidarity. The president-elect promised “the day would come when Tommy’s name would bring a smile to my lip before tears to my eyes”. There was also a call from Joe Biden, three days after Tommy died. It had been a point of pride that Raskin responded to every constituent, but a deluge of condolences made that impossible. Raskin takes some solace remembering the story of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, who died of typhoid fever at the age of 12 in 1862, plunging his parents into depression. Please look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me. These were his parting words: “Please forgive me. Raskin realized that for the last week of his life, his son had made an effort to impersonate someone in perfect mental health, so no one would intervene. The most powerful part of Raskin’s book, the heart-shattering part, is his love letter to Tommy, a “dazzling, precious, brilliant … moral visionary, a slam poet, an intellectual giant slayer, the king of Boggle, a natural-born comedian, a friend to all human beings but tyrants and bullies, a freedom fighter, a political essayist, a playwright, a jazz pianist, and a handsome, radical visitor from a distant future where war, mass hunger and the eating of animals are considered barbaric intolerable and absurd”. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images He is occupying my heart … He is showing me the way to some kind of safety … My wound has now become my shield of defense and my path to escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight.” Trump supporters clash with police on 6 January 2021. More chillingly, he reports the decision of some Democrats to cross their chamber after Congress was invaded, “because they thought a mass shooter who entered would be less likely to aim at the Republican side of the House”.īut Raskin was never afraid: “The very worst thing that could ever have happened to us has already happened … and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He realizes these “fascist bread crumbs throughout the city” should have activated “some kind of cultural alarm”. Driving to the Capitol, Raskin spotted Maga supporters heckling a young Black driver and a car with a bumper sticker reading: “If Guns Are Outlawed, How Am I Going To Shoot Liberals?” This is also a political memoir, of the Capitol attack and the second impeachment. His father described his illness as “a kind of relentless torture in the brain … Despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.” Congressman Jamie Raskin: ‘I’ll never forget the terrible sound of them trying to barrel into the chamber’ Like so many others with clinical depression, the catastrophe deepened his symptoms. Tommy was a second-year student at Harvard Law School when Covid began. In the state legislature, Raskin helped outlaw the death penalty and legalize same-sex marriage. Jamie Raskin taught constitutional law then ran for the Maryland senate, with Tommy, then 10, his first campaign aide. When Raskin was the only one acquitted, he famously demanded a retrial. In 1968, Marcus Raskin was indicted with William Sloane Coffin, Dr Benjamin Spock and others for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. His grandfather, Marcus Raskin, was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam war when he worked in the Kennedy White House. His maternal great-grandfather was the first Jew elected to the Minnesota legislature. Tommy Raskin was the fourth generation in a great liberal family. Raskin’s astonishing story of tragedy and redemption, of “despair and survival”, depended entirely on all the “good and compassionate people” like Tommy, “the non-narcissists, the feisty, life-size human beings who hate bullying and fascism naturally – people just the right size for a democracy … where we are all created equal”.
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