03/29/2024
Congressman Jamie Raskin last night at the Watergate Hotel received the 20th anniversary Ridenhour Prize for Courageous Truth-telling. We had a moment together before, and then as the program progressed I got to watch over his shoulder as, moved by an extraordinary evening, he feverishly made notes on his prepared remarks with a large blue Sharpie. "How's he going to read that?" I wondered.
He left the notes behind when he approached the podium and winged it with a rousing speech. It was further proof of my epigraph from Oscar Wilde, that "spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art."
Meeting Congressmen Raskin meant a lot to me because he figures in my conclusion:
In his final statement at the end of Trump’s second impeachment trial, Congressman Jamie Raskin called attention to “a pro-Trump protester who told his kids before leaving for Washington that he might never see them again.” Thinking like a prosecutor, Raskin had considered presenting the protester’s admission as proof that the violence was long planned. There was nothing spontaneous about the insurrection. But Raskin’s daughter Hannah helped him see past the legal and political implications of the insurrectionist’s farewell to his children. She saw the humanity the story carried, and the moral implications: “How can the president put children and people’s families in that situation and then just run away from the whole thing?” she asked. Hannah was a better listener than her dad. Listening well must form part of our agenda going forward
What Hannah Raskin responded to is what psychiatrist Jonathan Shay calls “moral injury.” Shay, a VA psychiatrist who has worked with combat veterans from the Viet Nam War and other American misadventures, argues that “moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.”
Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of Trump (p. 199).
