“I want to talk about pretending,” said Stephen Colbert after a somewhat muted and less dance-filled opening monologue, addressing us from behind a desk in the way that he has for a decade, save for the screen that he used to project his mad bastard persona upon. This was Colbert on the level, speaking about the Umpqua Community College shooting on The Late Show.
“I think that the least that we can do is not pretend to always know what to do or say. And in the face of the killings in Oregon yesterday, I honestly don’t know what to do or say […]”
“I think pretending is part of the problem. These things happen over and over again and we are naturally horrified and shocked when we hear about them, but then we change nothing and we pretend that it won’t happen again […]”
“I do know that one of the definitions of insanity is changing nothing and then pretending that something will change.”
Yesterday, I wrote about the need for late night hosts to pick up the baton from Jon Stewart and use their platforms to speak honestly about the world around us while echoing our collective frustrations. Stephen Colbert did exactly that, and while we all know that these words won’t spur action on their own, it continues the conversation and for a moment, makes it harder for all of us to curl up and pretend.
