For those of you who tuned in to watch The Daily Show on Thursday, June 18, you might have noticed that Jon Stewart didn’t stick to his usual formula of getting things started by cracking jokes at the events happening in our world.
Instead, Jon Stewart’s monologue gave us a very powerful and probing critique of the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting that left 9 people dead. Stewart called the massacre what it was, a racist attack: “I heard someone on the news say ‘Tragedy has visited this church.’ This wasn’t a tornado; this was a racist.”
Stewart goes on to comment on the “disparity of response” between foreign terrorist attacks and the attacks that are coming from fellow Americans. Stewart, like the rest of us, is baffled that Americans will go to such extreme lengths (torture, invasion, etc.) to protect their country from foreign threats, whereas when the threats are self-inflicted and based in our own backyards, the general response is typically “Hey, what are you gonna do,” and the blame for such outrageous acts of violence is focused on how mentally ill or crazy the perpetrator is.
Before Stewart apologizes for the lack of jokes at the end of his monologue, he reminds us who really holds all the power here: “Al Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage we can apparently do to ourselves…”
Watch the entire segment below, and don’t forget to keep those who were affected by the shooting in your mind/prayers.
