Fight for the Living

At the beginning of a lecture I saw yesterday, Congressman Jamie Raskin, whose most recent book is Unthinkable. Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, said that by the end of his talk he hoped to offer a more apt version of a quote from Mother Jones:

               Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Congressman Raskin’s beloved son, Tommy, committed suicide on December 30, 2020. He was buried on January 5, 2021. The next day, in spite of his grief, Raskin went to Congress to participate in the certification of the electoral college vote. He and fellow Democrats had prepared for the eventuality of Republican challenges, or of the even more “unthinkable” possibility that Vice President Pence would refuse to fulfill his constitutional obligation to count the votes as presented. What they had not prepared for was a violent insurrection.

Raskin’s lecture was inspiring and, as promised, he concluded by saying that the Mother Jones quote felt too disjunctive to him, as though praying for the dead and fighting for the living were separate and discrete activities. He proposed instead:

               Pray for the dead by fighting like hell for the living.

Last week an 18-year-old with a military style AR-15 rifle murdered 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Along with the usual “thoughts and prayers,” there were the usual angry protests that “thoughts and prayers are not enough.” To put Congressman Raskin’s phrase into action, we can pray for these latest victims – and all those who preceded them - by fighting to protect the innocent children and families who will become victims if we do nothing. We must enact gun safety laws now.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Across America, we will plant flags at the graves of fallen heroes and march along Main Street. I do not believe that those servicemen and servicewomen who died for us imagined an America where military style weapons would be used to massacre children in their hometowns. The best way we can pray for them, the best way we can honor them, is to fight for the living. We must enact gun safety laws now.