![]() By the time Tabitha and Hank left the Hill to go home on the night of Jan. In the aftermath of such wreckage, both personal and historic, it felt essential to Raskin to make a record of everything. 4, just before the first anniversary of the insurrection. The vivid details of that day are seared into Raskin’s memory and chronicled in his forthcoming book, “ Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy,” which will be published Jan. They spent a harrowing 45 minutes sheltering there, crouched under a desk, fearing for their lives as insurrectionists stomped down the hallway and jiggled the knob of the locked door as they passed. “I thought Tabitha didn’t want me to leave her alone,” Raskin says, “but it turned out she didn’t want me to be alone.” Amid the frenzied evacuation from the House floor, Raskin urgently texted Tabitha and Hank they were barricaded in the office of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) along with Raskin’s chief of staff, Julie Tagen. That night, it had been decided that Raskin’s younger daughter, Tabitha Raskin, and his son-in-law, Hank Kronick - who is married to Raskin’s daughter Hannah - would meet the congressman on Capitol Hill the following day for the certification of the electoral college votes, while Hannah and her mother, Sarah Bloom Raskin, would stay home with family. Why was the covid death toll so high at some veterans homes? He would come to make sense of this later: What was there to be afraid of when the worst thing imaginable had already happened to him? It was chaos, but Raskin watched it unfold with a strange sense of remove, a clarity of focus he did not feel the visceral fear that gripped so many others around him. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) tried to tend to her. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) succumb to a panic attack as Rep. Several Democrats were shouting furiously at their Republican counterparts: You did this! You let this happen! He glanced up at the gallery and saw Rep. Raskin remembers someone yelling instructions to retrieve the gas masks - he hadn’t even known there were gas masks beneath the chairs - and someone else calling for members of Congress to remove the lapel pins they wear to identify themselves. Some people raced to shove furniture against the shuddering doors others began making phone calls to loved ones, saying what they thought could be final goodbyes. “I would report to him about our work on the Hill to try to address the pandemic, always providing positive a spin as possible.Then came a chorus of screams as the House floor devolved into pandemonium on the afternoon of the Jan. “In the fall of 2020, I was many times conscious, while at dinner with Sarah and Tommy, of censoring stories on the tip of my tongue about the ordeals of immigrants or refugees that we had heard in the Judiciary Committee, because I knew how much they would upset and pain Tommy,” he writes. This in turn led to Mr Raskin not speaking of his work as a congressman lest he upset his son. ![]() ![]() Mr Raskin notes how many young people like his son also dealt with depression and suicide has spiked in people in his son’s age group. The two Raskins marched in a Black Lives Matter rally, which was the last protest the two would attend together. I tried to comfort him, and we talked about what to do in response.” “Tommy looked heartbroken and astonished, as though his mind and heart could not assimilate the reality of so much viciousness and cruelty being densely concentrated in one man, a lawless agent of the state. “He was in our kitchen when he handed me his phone,” Mr Raskin writes. “Relationships were strained, forced into a premature or awkward intimacy, or more likely, into a melancholy virtual oblivion.”Īt the same time, Mr Raskin writes how his son was despondent at the death of George Floyd. ![]() “With in-person school closed, social life was reduced to a fragile and masked minimum,” the elder Raskin writes.
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