Of Courage And Cowardice

For a moment, let us celebrate courage.

• Officer Brian Sicknick, 42-years-old, of South River, New Jersey, was a member of the U.S. Capitol Hill Police Department. Bluntly stated: It is reported that his skull was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher by insurrectionists. Prior to joining the Capitol Police, he was deployed to Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan with the Air National Guard. The 12-year member of the CHP earned his bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice, rescued dachshunds and was an ardent fan of the New Jersey Devils hockey team. He is survived by his parents, two brothers and his girlfriend of eleven years. “Brian is a hero and that is what we would like people to remember,” his family said in a statement to the media.” "Officer Sicknick gave his life protecting the United States Capitol, and by extension, our very democracy, from violent insurrection. His needless murder at the hands of a mob bent on overthrowing the Constitution he had dedicated his life to upholding is shocking,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

• Capitol Hill Police Officer Eugene Goodman’s quick thinking and courage may have saved the lives of many senators and their staff members by diverting a terrorist mob – led by Q-Anon t-shirt wearing Doug Jensen of Iowa – away from an entrance to the Senate - just minutes before authorities were able to secure the chamber. Armed only with a night stick, which he grabbed from the floor while already under attack, Officer Goodman drew the mob – some carrying Confederate flags and others will allusions to the Nazi flag - away from the Senate chamber. “As [the] fascist mob ransacked the US Capitol, this brave USC officer kept murderous rioters away from the Senate chamber and saved the lives of those inside,” wrote congressman Bill Pascal. “His quick thinking and decisive action that day likely saved lives, and we owe him a debt of gratitude,” wrote Senator Bob Casey.

This because a perfidious, pusillanimous, narcistic sociopath who is demonstrably incapable of honesty or fealty to anyone but himself promised his delusional sycophants.

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women… because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong…

“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. … We are going to the Capitol….”

One problem: The man so pathologically devoid of courage and truth quickly turned tail, ducked into his armored, Secret Service-protected limousine and fled to the security of his protected residence, while his acolytes rioted and committed murder and treason. 

“Jesus wept…” 
John 11:35

Hours before this despicable act of cowardice, Congressman Jamie Raskin and Sarah Bloom Raskin gave us a remarkable example of courage, strength and empathy:

“On January 30, 1995, Thomas Bloom Raskin was born to ecstatic parents who saw him enter the world like a blue-eyed cherub, a little angel. Tommy grew up as a strikingly beautiful curly-haired madcap boy beaming with laughter and charm, making mischief, kicking the soccer ball in the goal,…  hugging strangers on the street, teaching our dogs foreign languages, running up and down the aisle on airplanes giving people high fives,… and at 12 writing a detailed brief to his mother explaining why he should not have to do a Bar Mitzvah…  

“Over the years he was enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters,… and spoiled rotten with hugs and kisses and philosophical nourishment from his grandparents…

“… his irrepressible love of freedom and strong libertarian impulses made him a skeptic of all institutional bureaucracy and a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble. Once when third-grade Tommy and his father saw a boy returning to school after a weeklong suspension and his Dad casually remarked, ‘It looks like they let finally let him out of jail,’ Tommy replied, ‘no, you mean they finally let him back into jail.’

“At Blair [his high school], Tommy’s adult persona began to take shape: he co-founded Bliss, a life-changing peer-to-peer tutoring program and spent hours tutoring fellow students in Math and English; made wonderful friends he lavished attention on;… 

“On Prom Night, he threw a dinner party for 24 fellow students, including classmates who had no date that evening, and they all went to prom together as a group. He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’

“Above all, he began to follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war. A Bar Mitzvah from Temple Sinai, he taught a Sunday School… often substituting his social-struggle analysis of the Exodus story for teachings on the Hebrew alphabet. He ordered and devoured books on the Civil War and Maryland’s history in it, World War II and resistance to Nazism, Jewish history, libertarianism, moral philosophy, the history of the Middle East conflict, peace movements, anything by Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and anything by Peter Singer on animal rights. He began to pen these extraordinary essays and articles that now add up to well over 100 as well as write plays and extremely long polemical poems, which he eagerly performed for audiences astounded by his precocious moral vision, utter authenticity of emotion, and beauty of expression.

“At Amherst College, he majored in history, helped lead the Amherst Political Union,… Tommy became an anti-war activist, a badass autodidact moral philosopher and progressive humanist libertarian, and a passionate vegan who composed imperishable, knock-your-socks-off poetry… it will be hard to find anyone his age who has turned more carnivores into vegans than him. (He also cheerfully opposed sectarian holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness among a handful of vegans he met and would say, ‘I’m working for a vegan world, not a vegan club.’) A prolific and exquisitely gifted writer, he came to publish essays and op-eds… After his Amherst graduation, Tommy went to the Friends Committee on National Legislation to work on stopping the war in Yemen and on Middle East policy… 

“In 2019 Tommy went to Harvard Law School…  he loved the systematic thought and debate dynamics of law school but reported it to be like half an education because the moral philosophy component was somehow left out. Rather than read endless lists of long cases, why not have students read clear comprehensive statements of what the law is and then talk about what the law should be? So while zealously promoting his newfound favorite game — Boggle — to rescue his classmates and himself from the stress and anxiety of law school, he also pushed them to engage with social problems and found a strong affinity group in the Effective Altruists. He spent last summer working quite brilliantly as a summer associate at Mercy for Animals and found a knack for actual lawyering.

“This fall Tommy not only took a full complement of his second-year law classes,… but,… became a Teaching Assistant… in his ‘Justice’ Course at Harvard. As a teacher, Tommy devoted great time to teaching his section of the class — working on his astonishing lectures and jokes, and meeting endlessly with his dozen students on Zoom, finding what was precious in their work and teasing it out. He loved his students and they loved him back. Not content with giving half of his teaching salary away to save people with malaria by purchasing mosquito nets with global charities, when the semester was over and after his grades were in and the student evaluations were complete, he made individual donations in each of his students’ names to Oxfam, GiveDirectly and other groups targeting global hunger. When I asked him why he did this, he quoted something that he loved which Father Daniel Berrigan said about Dorothy Day: ‘she lived as though the truth were true.’ Tommy said: ‘I wanted them to see that the truth is true.’ 

“We have barely been able to scratch the surface here, but you have a sense of our son. Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’ as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.

“On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.

“He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: ‘Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.’”

As a nation, as individuals, as families and friends of those who have been ravaged by the “blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’” as men and women and children overwhelmed by the “relentless torture…called depression,” as individuals of all ages who have considered or – happily – unsuccessfully attempted suicide, as the surviving families and friends of those who have died as a result of the “blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’” we are grateful for the courage of the family of Tommy Raskin.

And, in our shared Episcopal and Roman and traditions, we pray:

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore, we will not fear, 
though the earth give way
And the mountains fall into the sea…
The Lord Almighty is with us;
The God of Jacob is our fortress.
Come and see what the Lord has done…
He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
…The Lord Almighty is with us;
The Gd of Jacob is our fortress.
Psalm 46

O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: 
accept our prayers on behalf of your servants 
Brian and Tommy, and grant them
an entrance into the land of light and joy, 
in the fellowship of your saints.

Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord;
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May their souls, and the souls of all the departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.