Sanity prevails at Comedy Central rally in D.C.
Sometimes the best motivator for political change is to avoid the topic of politics all together.
That is what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did on Saturday at their “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”
The rally, which CBS News said was attended by 215,000, give or take 10 percent, was surprisingly non-partisan. In fact, it was the most apolitical event I have seen since the birth of my baby sister.
Politics are everywhere nowadays. With this being an election year, it is even more prominent. Stewart and Colbert did an excellent job of keeping to their original course — to prove to Washington politicians and media pundits that Americans are stuck in the middle of screaming from the far right and yelling from the far left, and they want out.
Stewart said the image that the 24-hour news channels portray of the American people is false. He said they paint a picture of an America divided, an America that is unwilling to work with itself to solve problems.
He used the example of people having to merge into a one-lane tunnel, saying, “You go and I’ll go.” That is how the US operates most of the time, but every once and a while, there is the guy who rides the shoulder and cuts you off. This is what CNN, MSNBC and Fox News use as their example of the American people.
Of course, we know this is not true. But it is often how Americans are shown.
On one side there is the Tea Party movement, a right-wing conservative group focused on lessening the federal government’s power and lowering taxes, while on the left you have apparent socialists trying to take over private business.
There is a lot of support for these sides, regardless of either’s validity, but most Americans are in the middle. If Michigan was the political landscape, with the political left living in the west and the right in the east, most people would live here in Mount Pleasant.
That is what Stewart and Colbert wanted to illustrate and, in my opinion, they did just that.
Most of the rally was a mash-up of musical performances, satirical poems, awards for reasonableness and a mock debate between the co-hosts. But it was the final 10 minutes that were the most important.
Stewart removed his “comedian-pundit-talker guy” hat for a very sincere message.
He said, “We live now in hard times, not end times, and we can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictionator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.”
Stewart also added, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”
If screaming is all we hear from both sides, it just becomes white noise.
Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow, put down the megaphone and use your inside voices for a change.
