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Jamie Raskin: Hope and Democracy
Update: 2024-10-21
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In this deeply moving episode, Mary Chapin Carpenter converses with Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland about his journey through significant personal and national hardships, including the tragic loss of his son Tommy and the tumultuous January 6th Capitol insurrection. Raskin reflects on his activist roots, inspired by the apartheid divestment movement and his grandfather's public service legacy. The discussion highlights the pivotal role of hope and resilience, differentiating it from innate optimism, and examines the enduring faith in democracy despite political and societal challenges. Emphasizing the importance of collective action, Raskin draws parallels between art and politics in fostering societal good, and calls for renewed commitment to democratic principles and environmental stewardship.
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Transcript
00:00:00
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:03
It's not a conscious, deliberate choice to hang on to hope.
00:00:07
It's just a conscious deliberate choice to try to hang on.
00:00:10
My guest today, Congressman Jamie Raskin, said something recently that is really stuck with me.
00:00:20
He said, when we were growing up, my dad used to say to us, when everything looks hopeless, you're the hope.
00:00:29
Jamie is someone that I, his constituents in the state of Maryland, and a lot of people in the United States looked to for hope.
00:00:37
He studied and fell in love with the Constitution, then spent years molding young minds as a law school professor and joined Congress in 2017.
00:00:48
But in late 2020, everything changed.
00:00:52
It was the height of COVID.
00:00:54
He lost his beloved 25-year-old son, Tommy.
00:00:58
And just one week later, Jamie was in the capital on January 6th, while insurrectionists stormed the building.
00:01:06
Jamie wrote beautifully, exquisitely, about these darkest of dark days in his book, Unthinkable, Trauma, Truth, and the trials of American democracy.
00:01:18
And in it, he tells the story of the lifeline, the path that led him back to hope.
00:01:23
Why shouldn't we?
00:01:27
This is hope as a muscle.
00:01:30
I'm Mary Chapin-Carpenter.
00:01:31
Can you tell me how you found your way into activism in law school?
00:01:41
What did it feel like when you first started getting engaged in that regard?
00:01:46
Well, the big issue when I was in law school was the question of getting the corporations to divest from apartheid South Africa.
00:01:55
And I've noticed, with a lot of politicians, my age, like Barack Obama, who I think is just like two years older than me, a lot of us were anchored in that period.
00:02:04
Jennifer Graham Hall-Jusis, Secretary of Energy and was governor of Michigan, was in my class in law school.
00:02:10
And we got in trouble together at Harvard Law School.
00:02:14
Harvard Law School sent a letter to the bar about both of us, by punishing us and disciplining us for engaging in mass rally situations to get Harvard to divest its money from apartheid.
00:02:32
That was an issue that our generation felt very strongly about.
00:02:38
I mean, it was a completely racist authoritarian society where black people and so-called colored people and all of the different ethnic groups were subordinated in a racial hierarchy.
00:02:54
And apartheid made life just intolerable and sufferable for people in South Africa.
00:03:03
So anyway, that was the galvanizing question of our times.
00:03:10
Harvard, unfortunately, did not equit itself very well.
00:03:13
There were a lot of universities and colleges that got out that did divest, and Harvard kept slicing the belonging really fine.
00:03:20
Well, we'll divest from corporations that have a majority of their investments in South Africa.
00:03:27
So we ended up having a huge demonstration with like 15 or 20,000 people in Harvard Yard telling Harvard to stand in the moral center and make the right decision.
00:03:39
So that was your gateway into the activism in that sense?
00:03:43
That was, yeah, that was really the central issue.
00:03:47
I mean, I've always considered myself and thought of myself as a political person.
00:03:51
My maternal grandfather was the first Jewish person ever elected in the Minnesota State Legislature.
00:03:59
Actually, he made the second.
00:04:00
He made the first one in the 20th century.
00:04:03
But he was a great model for me because he showed that somebody who aspires and attains to public office is just a servant of the people and is working to get things done for people.
00:04:15
And you have followed in his footsteps.
00:04:18
The moment that somebody in public office is not acting as a servant of people is the moment to eject and reject and revoke and impeach and convict and start all over again in democracy.
00:04:33
The office holders are nothing but the servants of the people.
00:04:37
Amen to that.
00:04:39
You strike me as a person who has very much in the present moment.
00:04:44
And at the same time looking forward to the future.
00:04:48
What isn't working right now?
00:04:49
What legislation can we pass to make things better?
00:04:53
But when you sat down to write your book unthinkable, trauma, truth, and the trials of American democracy, you had to sit with the recent past and you had to dive pretty deep into it.
00:05:09
How did you prepare yourself for that writing process and can you share what you learned about yourself in that process?
00:05:20
That's a big question.
00:05:21
You asked some serious questions, very chicken and carpenter.
00:05:24
First of all, that book was written in a period of intense insomnia.
00:05:30
So I wasn't sleeping after we lost our son, Tommy, on the last day of 2020.
00:05:35
And after the nightmare of January 6th.
00:05:39
And so I figured I was up all the time and in great pain and anguish about the loss of Tommy.
00:05:48
And so I decided that I was going to have to try to record every TTL that I could of his life and what happened.
00:05:58
And basically started doing the same thing about January 6th and looked through with the sixth and with the impeachment trial.
00:06:08
Speaker Pelosi had asked me to be the lead impeachment manager when we went over to the Senate side to bring the code of impeachment against Trump for inciting insurrection against the Constitution and against the Congress and the vice president.
00:06:25
So the writing of the book was a journey to some very, very dark places.
00:06:31
But it was also kind of a lifeline for me.
00:06:35
And I felt the same way about Pelosi asking me to be the lead impeachment manager.
00:06:41
I didn't know after we lost Tommy, whether I would be able to do anything they can of any meaning or substance in the world.
00:06:51
I felt totally bereft and destitute, decimated.
00:06:59
But as you dove into this job that Speaker Pelosi offered you, were you aware of this paradox of that it's the hardest thing?
00:07:12
This is the toughest time in your life, the most painful experience you've ever had.
00:07:17
But at the same time that as you say that it was a sustenance for you, were you aware of that paradox as you were embarking on the January 6th committee?
00:07:28
While it was happening or did you realize that in hindsight?
00:07:31
Yeah, no, I know I felt it very much at the time that she threw me a lifeline.
00:07:37
I mean, I didn't know whether I would be able to grab onto it and pull myself out.
00:07:42
I mean, I felt like I'd been traveling in the underworld and part of it was COVID-19, which was just this blanket of darkness,
00:07:52
as you know, that fell upon the land.
00:07:54
And for people struggling with mental health issues like Tommy was, it was a great intensification of that isolation and the depression.
00:08:07
And you know, there were record rates of mental illness and record rates of suicide and just horrific things happening.
00:08:17
And then we lost Tommy and it felt like the whole world was turned upside down for us.
00:08:24
And then there was January the 6th, the psychiatrist I remember reading about, to find trauma is a radical violent rupture from your basic expectations of what life will be like.
00:08:41
And we certainly experienced that trauma with the loss of Tommy, who was so much, you know, with Hannah and Tabitha the center of our world.
00:08:51
And we experienced it again just one week later, literally from Wednesday to Wednesday, with this attempt at a political coup,
00:09:03
an overthrow of the presidential election in a violent insurrection, the coup.
00:09:09
And that also was a traumatizing thing because-- Absolutely.
00:09:15
You know, we always expected that there would be a peaceful transfer of power and no matter how egregious the candidate or no matter how traumatic the difference is that everybody would fundamentally accept the constitutional order.
00:09:32
Jamie, how did you hold on to hope during that dark period?
00:09:37
Or did it momentarily, or a day here or a day there, did it ever leave you?
00:09:43
Well, you know, and that's where, you know, I hear my dad's voice saying, when everything looks hopeless, you're the hope when you feel hopeless,
00:09:54
that's the moment when you're needed the most and other people need you.
00:09:59
And, you know, even with all of the devastation and the demolishing feelings of using Tommy, you know,
00:10:09
Sarah and I have our wonderful daughters, Tommy's sisters and all of his great cousins and uncles and aunts and family and thousands of friends and supporters writing to us from all over the place and in the midst of all of it,
00:10:29
I know there were other people including Tommy's friends who were suffering, who needed us, who needed us and do all of that.
00:10:41
And that's, you know, that's basically what Pelosi was saying to me.
00:10:45
She said, you know, Pelosi was with me from the very first day of the nightmare and still she was saying, we need you and you've got a rally and so it gave me the chance to try to help other people and to let other people help me.
00:11:08
And, you know, that's all you can do.
00:11:11
It's not a conscious, deliberate choice to hang on to hope.
00:11:15
It's just a conscious deliberate choice to try to hang on, you know.
00:11:18
That is a choice, I suppose.
00:11:20
I mean, I definitely could feel the pull of just surrendering everything saying, you know what?
00:11:28
There's so much darkness in the world and then I just started thinking about all the people I love and, you know, all the kids in our family and,
00:11:38
you know, everything that I want for America.
00:11:42
And I said, oh no, I'm not going to do that.
00:11:44
I'm going to keep Tommy right with me in my heart.
00:11:47
He'll just be with me every step along the way.
00:11:51
He sort of has been my guide and, you know, I recorded my book, how, when January 6th happened and we had buried Tommy the day before and just the darkest,
00:12:05
grimest, graced days, pounding rain and we couldn't even have anybody but family come because of the COVID-19 rules and precautions and all that.
00:12:19
But I just remember on January 6th, not feeling afraid at all, even with the proud boys and the boat keepers and the Ku Kux Klan and the rap aging mob and not knowing whether they had AR-15s or the fire bombs with them,
00:12:35
even with all that stuff, I was not afraid for one second because the worst thing that ever could have happened had already happened to me and I could really feel Tommy pushing me along.
00:12:48
He was a remarkable dazzling young man who loved democracy and freedom and human rights and animal welfare and he wanted a lot more out of democratic government,
00:13:00
not a lot less.
00:13:02
It's what else could I do?
00:13:04
I wish I could have met him.
00:13:06
It was a beautiful soul.
00:13:09
This podcast, as you may recall, is called Hope is a Muscle and so, first of all, do you agree with that?
00:13:18
And if you do, how would you advise someone how to keep that muscle in good working order?
00:13:26
I've got a poster on my wall, Mary Chapin, which says, "Your heart is a muscle, the size of your fist.
00:13:37
Keep loving, keep fighting."
00:13:39
And I've had that ever since I got cancer way back in 2010 and 2011, so I suppose when we talk about hope,
00:13:50
we're talking about your heart, and it is a muscle, like all muscles you got to exercise your muscles every day, especially the older you get, you got to exercise more not less every day to keep them strong.
00:14:04
We know this, we know this, yes.
00:14:06
I once saw a speech with Nelson Mandela, but don't quote me on it.
00:14:13
Maybe I imagine it, but I'm pretty sure I saw it with Nelson Mandela where he distinguished between optimism and hope, and he said, "Optimism is almost like a personality trait you're born with.
00:14:25
Some people are more optimistic, some people are more pessimistic, and that's just in the mysteries and the miracles of heredity and genetics, right?
00:14:36
But hope is something anybody can choose or feel the truth.
00:14:41
You can be an optimist or a pessimist and hope is a decision.
00:14:46
It is like telling yourself to go and exercise."
00:14:50
I absolutely love that.
00:14:51
I love that distinction.
00:14:54
To me, hope is closely related to the acceptance that much of life is uncertain and that change is inevitable in our lives.
00:15:05
It's just like I'm so afraid of change when I'm in the middle of it.
00:15:09
I think a lot of people feel the same way.
00:15:12
When you're on the other side of it, it's like, "Oh, thank God," so hope is related to life being uncertain and change is inevitable.
00:15:21
How does your career in life inform how you think about uncertainty?
00:15:25
I think when I go back to that Mandela distinction between hope and optimism, it's been easy for me because I have been a born optimist, and I think it's easier to grab onto hope,
00:15:37
even in the darkest of times, if you have an optimistic bent on things.
00:15:43
This is why my great passion has been democracy because I have so much fundamental optimism in faith in people and the wisdom of crowds.
00:15:55
I've got faith in democracy that we're going to make it work out.
00:15:59
Not necessarily right at the first moment, but we will.
00:16:02
It's like Winston Churchill said about America.
00:16:04
He said, "The Americans will always do the right thing once they've tried everything else first."
00:16:10
We will get around to doing the right thing.
00:16:13
Right.
00:16:14
When you say that you're born an optimist, would you describe your parents as optimists too?
00:16:20
Were you raised in an optimistic household?
00:16:23
Is that where it comes from for you?
00:16:25
Well, I think you might be a little more hard-wired than that, but yeah, it's certainly my father was a huge, huge optimist, and he never gave up on anybody.
00:16:35
I always love to tell the story about my dad.
00:16:38
We got into an elevator one time.
00:16:41
He was one of the founders of a Progress and Think Tank called the Institute for Policy Studies.
00:16:47
And it was actually, it may have been the first Think Tank, or at least the first Think Tank that didn't, that wasn't dependent on government money.
00:16:53
But anyway, we were at his office and we got into this elevator, and there was a guy in there who basically looked like a hell's angel.
00:17:01
He was a biker, he had on the bad dinner, he had tattoos all over his body.
00:17:06
And we got in, and I'm thinking to myself, "My dad's going to talk to him.
00:17:10
My dad's going to talk to him.
00:17:11
I'm going to talk to him.
00:17:12
Please don't talk to him.
00:17:13
Please don't talk to him.
00:17:14
He's sure enough."
00:17:15
My dad says, "Hey, he said, "You've got all these tattoos all over you.
00:17:20
Do you regret having gotten them to the dime?"
00:17:23
It's like probably in his 40s and maybe my dad was in his 50s at the time.
00:17:27
I think I was 16 years old.
00:17:28
It was like the prime time for being embarrassed by your parents.
00:17:32
But anyway.
00:17:33
Well, it was beyond embarrassment.
00:17:34
I mean, I was afraid, like this was good enough.
00:17:37
But my dad had this totally disarming, beautiful way of talking to anybody and everybody.
00:17:43
And I really thought, I was hoping for a hostile nonviolent answer, but I was afraid we could get something else.
00:17:50
But he said, "Well, I kind of liked it at the time, but now my daughter, she's a teenager and she wants to get them and I don't want her to get them."
00:18:00
And it's hard for me to tell her, "No, because I've got all these tattoos and my dad said, "Well, I think they look really beautiful on you and I think you should let your daughter get one too."
00:18:09
Oh, God.
00:18:10
That's such a great response.
00:18:12
Oh, my gosh.
00:18:13
You know, Jamie, you and I, we like to go for walks in Rock Creek Park.
00:18:18
Yes.
00:18:19
Like you.
00:18:20
You called them walks.
00:18:21
I call them for hikes.
00:18:22
For me, that's big exercise.
00:18:23
Okay.
00:18:24
I like to take our dogs and we go hiking, walking through Rock Creek Park.
00:18:28
And this is my experience.
00:18:30
We can't walk five feet on a weekend without people stopping you and saying, "Hi, Congressman Raskin, we really love you and you are our hope.
00:18:42
Keep going."
00:18:43
And you always have time to speak to every single person.
00:18:48
I have observed this firsthand.
00:18:50
And you always ask people about themselves.
00:18:53
You are your father's son.
00:18:56
And I find it really inspiring.
00:18:58
And in many ways, you're the action of their hope.
00:19:03
That's a lot of expectations on your shoulders.
00:19:07
How does it feel to be carrying that hope?
00:19:09
How do you deal with?
00:19:10
Does that ever feel too heavy or does it feel in a strange way?
00:19:16
Does it lift you up?
00:19:17
Yeah.
00:19:18
I mean, that's my job.
00:19:19
So I thrive on the ability to mobilize the incredible energies and talents of people in my district, district of Maryland.
00:19:30
That's right.
00:19:31
Montgomery County, a little piece of Prince George's, but also to draw on the talents and energies from people around the country and then channel them into progress, which is what politics is all about.
00:19:42
I mean, government is not a money-making opportunity for the guy who gets in and his family and his corporations.
00:19:50
Government is an instrument for the common good, for everybody.
00:19:53
It's for uplifting everyone.
00:19:55
So I consider it a great blessing to have a job where I can do that.
00:20:01
And yeah, maybe that's the reason why I insist on calling it a hike because we stop so much to talk to people.
00:20:06
I've got to remind myself, I'm trying to exercise now, but I just love you have a minute for every single person and it lifts me up as your hiker friend.
00:20:18
Mary Chapin, you're in the same business.
00:20:20
I'm in.
00:20:21
You're in the hope business.
00:20:22
It's just that you've got a beautiful voice and I tell.
00:20:25
And you're a great musician, and I'm not, but you inject and infuse people with hope and beauty.
00:20:31
You know, we don't get too much beauty in politics.
00:20:35
We do get some hope.
00:20:36
And if we do our job right, we get some justice and I guess there's something beautiful about justice.
00:20:41
Right.
00:20:42
There is something beautiful about justice.
00:20:44
But my dad was also adamant about the fact that conscious politics, even in its best, is not everything.
00:20:52
And it can never be a substitute for music or for art or for dance or for great literature.
00:20:58
And so those things have independent value for human beings.
00:21:05
That's what gives us civilization and democracy is the system that we hope liberates the creative energies of everybody and gives people the opportunity to pursue their ability to speak to other people in the most profound and meaningful way they can.
00:21:23
I was just thinking when we were together last February for the kickoff for your re-election campaign, and the one song that you asked us to sing for the folks assembled was "Patty Song."
00:21:38
People have the power.
00:21:45
I mean, what I love about that,
00:21:57
"Patty Smith" song, people have the power, is that that is the fundamental axiom of democracy.
00:22:14
Democracy means ruled by the people.
00:22:18
And what's going on on the planet earth these days is an attack on democracy by people who are asserting some other system of government.
00:22:28
Like the theocrats who say in Saudi Arabia or Iran, we're going to claim a right to rule over everyone based on the Quran or the Bible or the cluptocrats like Donald Trump who say,
00:22:44
"Well, we're going to use government to steal from the people or the autocrats, the traditional Putin or ban.
00:22:53
We are going to govern with an iron fist and extinguish liberty and freedom."
00:22:58
All of those systems have something of the quality of the emperor's new clothes from the perspective of democracy where we say in democracy that the only legitimating principle for a government is the consent of the government.
00:23:15
And all these other things are pretenders to the throne and people are trying to trick us into moving into some other form of government, which is inescapably tyrannical and despotic.
00:23:29
So I love that Paddy Smith song because it asserts in every domain of life the people have the power and the people have the power to rule, to wrestle the world from fools,
00:23:41
the people have the power to love,
00:23:52
to strike, to vote and so on.
00:24:05
It's a pretty amazing song.
00:24:12
Jamie, as a U.S.
00:24:14
representative, part of the reality of your workplace is that you have to work with people that you may vehemently disagree with.
00:24:23
You and I have talked about this on our walks, on our hikes.
00:24:26
And I'm always going, "How can you do that?
00:24:28
How can you do that?"
00:24:29
There's fighting and arguing on some fundamental issues that have huge consequences.
00:24:35
And of course, I imagine your constituents, not to mention so many Americans, are having deep disagreements with friends and loved ones and family members.
00:24:47
So how do you prepare yourself to endure those difficult conversations and how do you find that hope may be a part of that?
00:24:56
Well, I mean, there's an intellectual and an emotional challenge, right?
00:25:01
So intellectually, when people are throwing the stuff at you, that's great.
00:25:05
Now your political adversary, your enemy is your best friend because they're training your mind to be as systematic and as nimble as possible in terms of advancing strong arguments for liberal principles like equal rights for everybody and freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
00:25:28
emotionally, the thing to do, you got to think about Dr.
00:25:32
King, you know, that love is the most powerful weapon.
00:25:38
And love is very close connected to a sense of humor, that is a recognition of the human species, as a species, the recognition of humanity on Earth being this tiny speck in this universe of planets and in this almost infinity of lifetimes.
00:26:00
We have just, you know, it's the wink of an eye for us, right?
00:26:04
And so we have to make the most of it as we can.
00:26:08
And love is the powerful emotion that's going to get you through it.
00:26:12
So you read any of the great writers, I mean, take Stephen King, for example, it's all about the people on the side of love and the positive emotions, defeating,
00:26:23
you know, the darkness and the virus, which is always closely connected to fascism.
00:26:28
And I keep going back in my mind to when you were, you know, paraphrasing, I believe the quote from Nelson Mandela, and that you can be born an optimist, but hope is something you choose.
00:26:40
And I can't help but think that you choose love too.
00:26:42
The love is something you choose hope is something you choose whenever possible, right?
00:26:46
Yeah, that's totally right.
00:26:48
I mean, the way I think of it is there's sort of a basket of positive emotions that don't get back to each other.
00:26:55
And there's a basket of negative emotions.
00:26:57
And those are the ones that authoritarian politics thrive on, contempt and hatred and fear and division and snobbery and cruelty and,
00:27:11
you know, unbridled greed and avarice all those things go together.
00:27:19
And then you've got the positive emotions on the other side.
00:27:21
I'm going to sort of try to wind this down with this very broad question.
00:27:26
What or who is giving you hope right now?
00:27:30
Well, you do have to look to the past because there are people who have faced much worse odds than we have in times of much worse danger and oppression.
00:27:43
I qualify that only by saying we haven't really gotten to confront the real danger of our times yet, which is not Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
00:27:52
We're going to sweep them away.
00:27:55
It is climate change.
00:27:56
That's really what we have to confront.
00:28:00
And that presents a completely different paradigm for understanding politics.
00:28:05
And again, I have to come back to talk about that one.
00:28:08
But when you look at American history, you look at what the abolitionists were facing and black slaves were facing in America.
00:28:18
What Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were looking at?
00:28:23
You look at the civil rights movement and you look at Bob Moses, who went down to Mississippi.
00:28:29
He was a graduate student in philosophy and math at Harvard.
00:28:33
He opened up the newspaper, he saw black students sitting in at a lunch counter and he said they looked the way that I felt.
00:28:42
And he knew that he had to go down to the south and he went to Mississippi and he thought he was going to be organizing sit-ins and motels and hotels and restaurants.
00:28:51
And he met Amsy Moore, who was the head of the local NAACP where he went.
00:28:57
And he said, no, we don't need that.
00:28:59
He said, look around you, you're in a congressional district that's two thirds black and nobody can vote.
00:29:06
Less than 1% of African Americans were registered.
00:29:09
Bob Moses came up with the slogan, one person, one vote.
00:29:13
That wasn't invented by the Supreme Court.
00:29:15
That's what he was saying, going door to door, nearly getting himself killed.
00:29:20
But it galvanized the entire nation, it led to the Freedom Summer, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the challenge of the Democratic Convention,
00:29:32
the transformation of the Democrats, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
00:29:39
We've got to make the same kinds of decisions with courage and honor that Bob Moses and Snickmaid in the 1960s in our own time in terms of confronting injustice and tyranny and the autocrats.
00:29:55
There are millions and millions of Americans of all ages, but especially young people, they've been so inspired and uplifted and galvanized, certainly by the seeds of hope that are planted in just saying it's not about one person,
00:30:12
it's about the team, it's about all of us, it's about everybody in America and there is space for new leadership.
00:30:19
I mean, it's everybody coming forward to say, we've got skin in the game, like we're part of this process.
00:30:27
That's what democracy is, democracy is the thing we all take care of together.
00:30:33
So Jamie, have you got anything you'd like to add?
00:30:36
I'm going to leave you with a little bit of hope from Frederick Douglass and Tom Payne.
00:30:40
Oh good, okay.
00:30:41
So, I look to the young people because they're beyond racism, antisemitism, homophobia, immigrant bashing and misogyny, but I also look to history and two of the key figures in my heart,
00:30:54
in my mind, are Frederick Douglass and Tom Payne.
00:30:57
And Douglass was born about 45 minutes away from my house at the Y River plantation into slavery and he escaped from slavery and became a great freedom fighter and never gave up hope,
00:31:10
including in the U.S.
00:31:12
Constitution.
00:31:12
When other people like William Lloyd Garrison were giving up on the Constitution saying he was a pact with the devil, he was saying, no, there's very good stuff in the Constitution and we're going to improve the Constitution.
00:31:23
And after the Civil War, we did and we're continuing to do that.
00:31:25
But anyway, Douglass said if there is no struggle, there's no progress.
00:31:31
And the struggle may be moral, it may be physical, it may be moral and physical, but there must be struggle.
00:31:38
Power conceives nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.
00:31:42
And then Tom Payne, who our beloved Tommy was named after, came to America in 1774, two years before the American Revolution.
00:31:53
He fell in love with the promise of America, he said, if this land lives up to its values and its ideals, it will become an asylum to humanity, he said.
00:32:03
Not an insane asylum, mind you, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from political and religious and economic oppression, and then he wrote common sense about the sense we have in common,
00:32:15
and we're willing to reason and listen to each other and speak together without religious dictatorship and without conspiracy theory and all that.
00:32:26
And it incited the American Revolution.
00:32:29
And it gave hope to people, but 1776 was a tough year.
00:32:33
And half the people running around saying, for all of human history, people have lived with kings and queens and zars and emperors and merger of church and state and compulsory religion,
00:32:46
and you can't break that.
00:32:48
And the other half of the people were willing to gamble on it, but people would get nervous and people would get anxious.
00:32:54
And they saw that.
00:32:55
And so, just like now, it split right down the middle and Payne wanted to give people hope and encouragement.
00:33:04
He wrote this pamphlet called the American Crisis.
00:33:07
I just want to quote this little passage for you, Chapin, and I'm going to update the language pursuant to instructions from Nancy Pelosi because she said Payne was a feminist and now he was.
00:33:18
And so he wouldn't mind, and I don't want to offend modern sensibilities.
00:33:22
And so anyway, Payne wrote this.
00:33:24
He said, these are the times that try men and women's souls.
00:33:28
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink at this moment from the service of their cause in their country.
00:33:36
But everyone who stands with us now will win the love and the favor and the affection of every man and every woman for all time tyranny like hell is not easily conquered.
00:33:50
But we have this saving consolation.
00:33:53
The more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory.
00:33:58
So let's make that victory, ours, this year Mary Chapin Carpenter, we can do it.
00:34:04
What a beautiful thing to end on.
00:34:07
The past is present, is it not?
00:34:10
Like Faulkner said, the past isn't dead, it isn't even past.
00:34:13
That's right.
00:34:14
It lives in us.
00:34:15
And so we got to live with the monsters, but we can also live with all of the heroes who come before us and we can try to model ourselves after them.
00:34:23
And we choose hope the way, same way we choose love.
00:34:26
I love you, Jamie, you're asking.
00:34:27
Thank you so much.
00:34:28
And back to Mary Chapin Carpenter and thanks to you and all of your fans who have run into all over the place, all over America.
00:34:35
But thank you.
00:34:39
I obviously felt like when I was speaking with Jamie, I could have just been right on the trail at Ruckabee Park,
00:34:52
just yammering on with him.
00:34:54
He's exactly who he is in person, in real life, in person, away from the screen.
00:35:00
And he is a spirit of optimism as he is shared with us.
00:35:05
And I just feel completely lifted up by our conversation and inspired and emotional.
00:35:13
He's been through so much and he has such an open heart.
00:35:16
And he speaks with that open heart to everyone and to every subject with that open heart.
00:35:22
As well as an extraordinary intellect and knowledge.
00:35:27
I think it's obvious that he's been a teacher for a long time because he finds ways to make complicated things a little easier to understand and that's a real gift.
00:35:38
So I'm so glad that we got the chance to steal him away from his official duties for just a little while.
00:35:47
And he shared with us what Nelson Mandela said and the difference between optimism and hope that really rang a bell for me.
00:35:57
It makes everything so clear and it helps me understand inside of myself those times in my life when I have been empty without a North Star because I haven't been able to figure out how to get these darker feelings out of my gut and move past them.
00:36:22
You know sometimes you just need a quote from somebody that makes sense to you to help you sort of write yourself.
00:36:28
And I feel like Jamie provided that today.
00:36:37
Love is a muscle is produced by Jesse Baker, Eric Newsom, Eleanor Kagan, and he would take a ton.
00:36:45
Our sound designer is Kristen Muller.
00:36:48
I'm Mary Chapman Carpenter.
00:36:50
Stay mighty.
00:36:51
See you the next time.
00:36:52
[MUSIC]
00:36:55
We believe in things we're told that we can't change why shouldn't we?
00:37:03
[MUSIC]
00:37:13