Jon Stewart’s call for calm isn’t funny

For weeks “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” brilliantly skewered those who were leading and supporting a racist campaign against Muslims and the building of a Muslim community center blocks from the World Trade Center. And then on Sept. 16 Stewart announced he was holding a “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington, D.C., at the end of October, a sort of mocking of rightist Glenn Beck’s rally.

But Stewart did it by attacking progressive people who have been demanding the government take action to help the 30 million people who are unemployed or underemployed in the country; people who have been protesting against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in those countries and left U.S. soldiers with horrific injuries and trauma; people who led the demonstrations against racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. He equated the Tea Party with progressive groups like Code Pink, saying both are extremist. Spouting racism and fighting racism are not the same thing.

Stewart said it’s time for America to calm down.

It is really time for people to fight back the way they did in the 1930s. It’s time to demand a real jobs program like the Works Progress Administraton, where the government put millions of people to work on construction projects building bridges, schools, hospitals and roads; employed artists and musicians and actors who brought music and theater productions to small communities across the country; had writers go out and interview Black people and produce an oral history of slavery. It’s time to demand a halt to the closing of hospitals, bus lines (37 have been eliminated in New York leaving people stranded in the outer boroughs with no way to get to work), libraries, social programs, and assistance for elderly, the reduction in school days and elimination of educational grants.

Satire is useful. It can expose hypocrisy, cruelty and injustice in a searingly funny way. And Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are among the best of satirists. But people can only change things by joining together and fighting back. The end of segregation and implementation of civil rights came when people took to the streets. The end of child labor, the gaining of the eight-hour workday, and every other right given to workers only came through a hard struggle. Those fighting were met with violence and many died.

To call on people to calm down, be quiet and ignore the growing poverty and misery is a terrible thing. It is an effort to tamp down the struggle. It’s one thing for Stewart to hold an entertaining rally. But it’s another thing to tell people that it’s extremist and wrong to fight back.

The rallies people should really be going to are the national march for jobs in Washington on Oct. 2 and the youth and student actions to defend education on Oct. 7.