Friends,

If you are in need of a good laugh and a reminder that there is someone on Comedy Central once a week (usually Monday night at 11pmET) who feels our pain and has been a force for good for nearly 30 years — I hope you’ve been watching the return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show since February. He is pulling no punches. He is saying what many are afraid to say, and his cast and writers are on fire, just when we need them the most.

What I admire greatly is that he has been almost a lone voice on television in standing up, fearlessly, with his brutal humor and satire, and placing himself squarely on the side of the tens of thousands of civilians who have been slaughtered in Gaza — and the hundreds of thousands more who are facing imminent death by being purposely denied food, water, shelter, and medical care.

Phil Donahue, whom we lost last week, put honest, antiwar, anticorporate, antiracist, pro-feminist voices on millions of U.S. television screens for decades. Then he was banished by a corporate cartel that had monopolized the airwaves.

Social media provides an illusion of diversity, while establishing new monopolistic gatekeepers. Google was ruled an illegal monopoly in federal court earlier this month.

Media is only one area where corporate monopolization has taken over. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is the strongest U.S. government official against this trend that we've seen in a very long time.

But Big Tech billionaire and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman has donated tens of millions of dollars to Democrats in recent years, and he wants Khan fired.

Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war?

Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as the Trump-Harris race proceeds, not too many people (besides me) will be bringing up Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Jesuit priest, theologian, scientist, best known as the author of The Phenomenon of Man — who died seventy years ago.

But I can’t tolerate the clichés of state! So let me sneak a dozen or so of Teilhard’s words into the present moment: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.”