Editorial: ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ a timely opportunity

You remember that kid — yes, you do. That oh-so-eager kid in middle or high school who’d… You remember that kid — yes, you do. That oh-so-eager kid in middle or high school who’d make sure to always sit in the front row, and whenever the teacher would ask half a question he’d shoot up his hand and — stopping of course to gather his variegated opinions — he’d recite so much wrong or misguided information that you wondered how lowly the teacher actually thought of your class. Remember how frustrating it was to get any learning accomplished with that loud, erring voice drowning out the critical thinking process itself?

Unfortunately for people like you, that kid grew up — and now he can vote, write letters and checks, hold rallies, run for office and anchor highly rated programs on 24-hour news networks. That kid, who represents the unrelenting, unreasonable but nonetheless powerful fringes of our current political spectrum, has slowly wrapped his sweaty fingers around the jugular of the American agenda, gaining an influence so profound that he can no longer be ignored.

So we’re happy Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s satirical news program “The Daily Show,” is paying attention to this prototypical kid, or at least his faults, by holding a rally on the National Mall on Oct. 30.

The event is called the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and it is set to take place from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday alongside a sister rally, the “March to Keep Fear Alive,” organized by former “Daily Show” correspondent and now satirical talk show host Stephen Colbert. In an interview with CNN’s Larry King last week, Stewart said the rally is aimed “for the people that are too busy, that have jobs and lives and are tired of their reflection in the media as being a divided country and a country that’s ideological and conflicted and fighting.”

As we’ve learned from the millions of people who attended Barack Obama’s inauguration, a momentous gathering of earnest citizens doesn’t come close to healing a bitterly divided nation. But even so we can’t say that Stewart, who in a 2009 Time Magazine survey beat out Brian Williams to become America’s most trusted newscaster, is wasting his time.

Regardless of what exactly Stewart has in store for those early Saturday afternoon hours, the mere idea fueling the rally — and the fact that tens of thousands are expected to attend — offers the American people a kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along enough: the opportunity to finally reflect upon the quality of our discourse.

Too often our collective attention, which could be put to so much good use on solving issues like a crumbling education system or unsustainable Medicare promises, is leeched away by highly charged but no less irrelevant controversies.

Just because some witless statement or “mosque” proposal garner bicameral outrage doesn’t endow such arguments with any more significance for a struggling American people — it just makes them profitable as TV soundbites. Modern news coverage — and reflexively people too — think too much in terms of controversy, of who’s saying the most outrageous comment and who else wants to comment on that comment, instead of actually approaching hard issues that only get worse the more we stray from them.

We just hope Stewart’s rally will give those people whose reasoned, moderate voices have been so long drowned out a chance to realize they’re not alone. Because that kid shouldn’t always have to command the debate.