“I’m working for a vegan world, not a vegan club” Rabik, a Hopewell Township attorney, is an opinion columnist for The Times.Tommy Raskin. In sum, when everything looks hopeless, you are the hope.īernard J. We were blindsided and bypassed,” Ruskin wrote. And so we can’t let them be empty rhetoric.”Īmong his regrets, Raskin wishes he would have noticed more signs of his son quietly withdrawing from life and asked Tommy directly if he was considering suicide. And we will fight for every single thing he asked us to.” He says Tommy knew that “the things that we say are our values and principles only have meaning if we act as if they’re true, if we make them real. Going forward, Jamie Raskin says, his family “will keep Tommy very close to our hearts. Jamie Raskin says, “You couldn’t be in his presence and say a negative thing about people. Out of all the group of interns, “somehow he was the one who took responsibility for making sure everyone was doing OK, that no one felt left out, that everyone was connected.” “He held a rare level of empathy and compassion,” wrote Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, where Tommy interned. The stories of his love and compassion are absolutely astounding.Ī neighbor wrote to the Raskin family about a time when Tommy organized a group dinner in high school so his classmate who didn’t have a date to the prom wasn’t left out. But it wasn’t his mind that marked him as so extraordinary. He knew all the presidents and vice presidents in order. Tommy, according to his father, was remarkable from the beginning. The precious young man of boundless talent had given all his energy for the idea of the dignity and worth of all human beings. He gave us, and gave the world, “all his love.” He did not tell us to give up, to despair, to surrender, to become selfish, or despondent. Jamie Raskin would think of Tommy and the last part of his final message to us, which was not different in substance from the message of his life: “Look after each other and the global poor for me. His life and that of his wife and two daughters moved into a frightful and unexpected horror state. To wake him up, Jamie yelled, “Tombo, Tombo!” When he did not respond, Jamie knocked and went in.Īnd there, in a dreadful, indelible, irreversible instant of ghastly horror and disbelief, the father found his boy, his extraordinary only son, lying motionless on his bed. When Tommy didn’t respond, his father descended to the basement apartment where Tommy had been living for his second year of law school since the COVID-19 quarantine sent him home from Cambridge in March. When Jamie Raskin woke up on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020, the last day of the year, he went to the kitchen and called downstairs for Tommy to join him for a banana-and-peanut butter breakfast smoothie. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. “Tommy” as his father Jamie Raskin (a Democrat representing Maryland’s 8th Congressional District) calls him, was also tormented by depression. Raskin was a law student and teaching assistant at Harvard Law School who donated from his teaching salary to charities in his students’ names. At the age of 25, Thomas Bloom Raskin had already accomplished a great deal: He was a graduate of Amherst College and a member of several prominent organizations, a passionate vegan who wrote philosophical defenses of animal rights and converted those around him to give up meat.
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