In the wake of the Arizona shootings, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart put aside his political satire and witty jokes by opening Monday night’s Daily Show with a serious speech that didn’t point fingers at any particular person to blame, but rather questioned and examined the nature of the violence."Boy would it be nice to be able to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stopped 'this' the horrors will end."
Stewart opened the show with a few jokes, trying to lightheartedly, it seemed, talk about the shooting that shocked the nation. After a few laughs with his Senior Correspondent, John Oliver, Stewart transitioned into somber statement — “So here we are again stunned by a tragedy.
We have been visited by this demon before.”
He went on to give his condolences to those who were killed and affected by the tragic shooting, wondering what causes people to commit the crimes that they do.
“How do you make sense of these type of senseless situations seems to be the question that's on everybody's mind and I don't know that there is a way to make sense of this sort of thing.,” he said. Stewart added that the political pundit world who were working “feverishly to find the tidbit or two that will exonerate their side from blame” were “predictable” and “dispiriting.”
“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn't blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine,” he said, calling the political environment toxic and unproductive.
Amongst small jokes here and there, he later stated that he refused to give into the despair that the world is full of “crazies,” because “anonymous goodness does exist in the world. [Crazy] is rarer than you think. There is light in this situation.”
“Someone or something will shatter our world again and wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t take this opportunity and the loss of these incredible people…to make sure that the world we are creating now…wasn’t better than the one we previously lost.”
Even though we “can’t outsmart crazy,” as Stewart stated in his speech, we can send our prayers and condolences to those who lost their lives and who were affected by this tragedy. May peace be with you all.
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