Raskin went on, “Tommy had a clinical diagnosis, but, having said that, everyone’s mental-health struggles take place in a social context. He was an enormously joyful and happy and funny young man, but he experienced the other end of the emotional spectrum very acutely.” Or children separated from their parents at the border. “He could stay up all night worried about children caught in the civil war in Yemen. “Tommy was someone who felt the pain of other people in a way that you don’t come upon very frequently,” Raskin said. It takes its greatest inspiration from the idealism of Raskin’s son. The grief is nightmarish, but the love that suffuses the text is even more powerful––the love for family and a lost child, as well as a love for a fragile democracy. “Unthinkable” is not a work of emotional austerity rather, it is an unburdening, a howl, a devotional. And a lot of that is that we’re trying to honor the spirit and the wishes Tommy expressed in his farewell note: ‘Look after each other.’ That is a pretty specific set of instructions, and it has given me a roadmap for the rest of my life.” I am not drowning in grief and agony in quite the way I was. I just did the audio version, and that was wrenching to do.
“I was sleepless and couldn’t think about anything else. “I wrote this book in five months,” Raskin told me. Now, as a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, he is once more at the center of the struggle over the Trump legacy and the future of constitutional democracy. Not long after the insurrection failed, Nancy Pelosi tapped him to be the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment trial, a task he performed with eloquence and organizational skill. Now, whole minutes go by when his mind does not dwell on the loss and what he might have done to save his “dear boy.” Raskin has also been consumed by a sense of mission. When I first spoke to Jamie Raskin, early in the year, it was nearly impossible for him to talk about his son without weeping. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. Tommy had taken his own life and left behind a handwritten note for his parents and two sisters: “Please forgive me. On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Raskin found his son dead in bed.
And his condition deepened during the long months of COVID. He was an antiwar activist, a believer in justice for human beings and animals alike, a hungry reader, an avid writer-a generous, decent young man who, as a statement from his family described him, possessed “a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind.” Tommy Raskin also suffered from depression. Tommy Raskin, by all accounts, was a brilliant, politically committed student, who had been attending Harvard Law School. Meanwhile, maniacs shouting deranged slogans and threats were storming down the hallways of Congress in search of enemies. At the Capitol, Raskin told me, he could still hear the sounds of the day before: the prayers of mourning, the clods of dirt shovelled onto the casket. This bloody assault, which threatened constitutional democracy and the nation’s democratically elected leaders, came just one day after the burial of Thomas Bloom Raskin, the congressman’s beloved twenty-five-year-old son. He was at the Capitol with his colleagues on January 6, 2021, to witness what should have been the routine certification of Joe Biden’s election as President. A Democratic member of the House, Raskin is fifty-nine and represents Maryland’s Eighth District.
Others on Time’s list of “most influential people” for 2021 are distinctly more inspiring– Stacey Abrams, for example, who is leading the fight against voter suppression in the U.S., or the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who is languishing in a prison camp at the order of Vladimir Putin.Īnd yet one person of the year, an individual who embodies both the tragedy and resilience of our time, was missing: Jamie Raskin. I speak for no one except myself, but is this the moment to valorize a supposed man of science who cast early doubt on the COVID vaccines and told the world that “kids are essentially immune”? Might as well give the accolade to Eric Clapton. This year, the wealthiest individual in the world, Elon Musk, was Time’s choice for Person of the Year. seized Time’s cover and the annual laurel in Dumbo’s stead. Alas, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, rudely relegating the animated pachyderm to the inside pages of the magazine. In 1941, the editors tapped Dumbo, the Disney elephant, as Mammal of the Year. There have been a few odd choices along the way. This editorial gambit proved a winner on the newsstand, and a parade of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other worthies followed. Ninety-four years ago, the editors of Time magazine declared the transatlantic aviator and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh their first-ever Man of the Year.
0 kommentar(er)
