A Tribute to Jon Stewart

The reason why I loved Jon Stewart so much, why I became even more enticed to watch the show after I learned about deconstruction and critical analysis, is because people like him can teach us a lot.

They can teach us we do not have so many differences between us.

My first lessons of it came from Gene Roddenberry, and a show that still makes me a kid whenever I watch it.

Jon Stewart though turned this lesson into a strong and immemorial lesson, straight from camera three. J

I, and many people, have a great thanks to give to him. He introduced us to the concept of vigilance, because as I have said before, you cannot change people, you cannot do much to change the world, you are never going to change Human Nature, and you will be lucky to truly change your community.

You can easily change a perspective though.

When you change the paradigm, you can change how people approach a problem, and how they decide to live together.

I have friends who are staunch conservatives, and die-hard communists. I have friends who pray five times a day and friends who I might have to one day report for trying to dig tunnels under a church to steal the alter (NOTE: Please do not do this guys…I have zero experience with getting someone off for that one legally and I am not sure I am that good). I have friends who love “America” and friends who hate “America”. I have friends who probably want everything to be solved with an explosion, and friends who abhor the mere thought of any violence. I have friends who think Humanity is doomed, and friends who cannot wait to join me on the UFS Enterprise.

My friends, much like me, are pretty weird. J

Those of us who remain friends though, who still talk to each other, and at least one from each of these groups remains, stay friends because we can see through Stewart’s metaphorical commentary about bovine excrement.

We see what we believe as a measure of who we are because of what we personally understand. We know that many of our decisions are more a matter of what has happened, and has not happened, in our lives. We do not look at each other with eyes of judicial condemnation and providential decree.

To me, my Sunni, Shi’a, Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, Agnostic, Jewish, and Hindu friends are all incredibly ethical and upright people. I find them exceptional on the whole. I do not see any of them as lesser or greater because of what they believe. Much like how I see no difference between my Continental, Conservative, Labour, Apathetic, Socialist, Liberal, Anarchist, Theocratic, Libertarian, and Communist friends.

They know me, I know them.

I look at them as people, not as ideologies.

Perhaps that is some form of bovine excrement, but I find it to be in the innocuous category.

It is innocuous to propose that we can learn to live together.

It is disastrous to genuinely believe, in your heart and soul, we are doomed to forever be ensconced in cruelty and discrimination.

I find it almost provincial that Stewart signed off seventy years from the moment when the perhaps most iconic of the great crimes against Humanity occurred.

I find this so interesting because if I am correct than we can use it as measure, a mark of how far we have come, or regressed.

I know a lot about history, and I recall no commentator or critic so well known as Stewart in the 1950s and 1960s. You could say Edward Murrow did a lot, and was a very influential figure, but Stewart I feel is beyond professional and non-professional, reporting and satire.

Stewart to me, and many, taught us how to begin approaching a topic, and why the ludicrous loopholes and detours many a commentator and newscaster make are so debilitating to good conversation.

And yes, you do need to be taught that.

Before we merely assumed people would “mature”, but no one really did. It was simply a “simpler” world, and by that I mean communities and restrictions were rigid and rather absolute. Yet we have emerged from a very powerful century, for good or ill, will the ability to now people a click away from seeing one another and from learning practically anything.

This is an evolution in our cultural capacity that demands a similar moral and mental evolution, and we have, to this point, failed rather fully to make any such advance.

We are the product, whether we enjoy it or not, of being the losers for the first 4.6 billion years of Earth history. Even upon our culminating step to Homo sapiens as a proper species, we were more often the hunted, not the hunter, and what few things we did hunt, it becomes more and more evident that we were not particularly good at it.

We have programming that does not run on the current model of civilisation we have available to us.

The schematics for the operating system are very much available, but we do need to choose to use it to make something greater than we have.

People who teach you to look at something from a critical perspective, be they Jon Stewart or Big Bird, matter to your development.

They matter because the “club” that is acceptability is slowly a dying illusion. Why I put America in parentheses before is because I do not believe there are rational people who hate a landmass (dirt bothers me sometimes but what can I say, I grew fond of it) and I certainly do not think that a rational creature could ever hate an entire group of people for the actions and extremes of a minor percentage of that group.

Sure sociopaths can, but not rational, fair, ethical people.

Some of my friends hate the idea of America as this club for a specific set of people, and by that the main group of lunatics mean a Caucasian confederacy of gun-wielding, intellectually resigned amoralists who are more concerned of the interest yield on their CD than fair trade agreements, and who of course draw a god concept from the Latin Deus.

I hate this idea too.

I do not want “America” to be a club, because I find our soul too grand to be so pathetic.

You cannot start with the idea “all Men are created equal” and two hundred fifty years later be arguing about whether or not anyone gave two rats about who gets marriage benefits and who does not.

The two concepts are not able to coexist.

In that sense, I notice what most of my friends, and myself included, rage against is hypocrisy.

If you only want your country to have medicine that is fine – admit it.

If you are glad your country makes trillion every year because it sells things that go boom that is fine – admit it.

If you could not care less about someone different from you in some pathetically visual or expression-based fashion that is fine – admit it.

Now you say, ‘But then I will look like a huge douche bag and people will not accept me because it is not illogical to say that if that is how I act towards one person there is little to stop me being that way with everyone.’, then I would say, you are correct.

Sadly though, you probably will still get elected. Considering that we are not as morally and ethically evolved as we may pride ourselves to be, you might even get a medal and/or raise (not at all referencing Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump…not at all…).

In the main, yes, we do understand that thoughts like this make descent into inhumanity far too easy and accessible, but I also fail to see how we are making it so that this line of thinking stops altogether.

Stewart, and people like him, show us that there are ways to begin this process, and I hope Humanity does grow into itself to see the extremes are very rare.

In the end, there really are only four questions of which you can only be one side of the argument or the other.

Can Humanity govern itself, with equal representation for everyone?

Is value for a Human essential or extraordinary to the individual person?

Is every Human life an equal value, deserving of equal provision?

Are Humans an indelible product of our evolution, or can we condition ourselves out of analytical infancy?

My friends who continue to talk to me, I notice, answer these questions very similar to how I do (Yes., Essential., Yes., We can condition ourselves.), and I think most people have enough faith in themselves that they would answer the same.

The real excrement occurs when we know the answer to these questions, but we act in ways that demonstrates the opposite line of thought.

Whether we trick ourselves, or we fall back into bad habits when we act contrary to our ability to fairly assess these issues, honestly is not an important issue.

The important issue is whether or not we can accept lessons from great teachers to be more analytical, to not give in to our programming, to stop thinking we all belong to some exclusive and important “club”, to grow a tad of humility, and most importantly, to realise we are far more akin to one another than the peripheral and simplistic environs would have us believe.

Yes, this will be very difficult.

We need to do it though.

We need to challenge ourselves to see that once we know the answers to these questions that there is no divine or destined preponderance of events to get us to where we need to be in order to truly flourish.

Survival we have down – if that is all you are looking for, congratulations.

I look for more, and people like Jon Stewart teach us that vigilance is the preliminary activity in how we can achieve more for ourselves, and each other.

One final time Mr. Stewart, I thank you with a debt I cannot repay, and may you always be well, remembering that you are always a teacher to more than you may have ever known.

Live long, and prosper.