When I started speech class, essentially debate, as a required course during high school I was told by our teacher that ‘The O’Riley Factor’ presented an excellent model to emulate. I had already been regularly watching ‘The Daily Show’ for a few years and I tuned in to see what he was talking about. I have a vivid memory of him asking us, “Who runs America?” I raised my hand and said, ‘the big corporations.’

I would pay an unreasonable amount of money to have a meme of this instructors’ face as he simultaneously could not fathom the answer he had just received from an eleventh grader in the middle of nowhere Ohio and was shaking off whatever brand of whiskey was in his coffee. He responded with something to the effect of, “Well that’s true, but…” and then continued with whatever he was intending to say before he was unexpectedly interrupted.

That is Jon Stewart in a nutshell. If you were fortunate enough to have Comedy Central, you were exposed to a light in the dark. Before I knew anything about his political affiliation or my own, I knew he was funny. Even being as young as I was when I started watching, I could appreciate absurdity or irony like any other teenager, and with an open mind and loving parents that blossomed into liberalism in a wasteland of ignorance.

This was a catholic high school which brought with it all the conservatism, stupidity and circumstance you would expect. Another story from the same year, 2004, that I love to tell is how I fulfilled my four hour service requirement for our Junior religion class that quarter. Terrified, but emboldened, I volunteered for a total of four hours cold calling voters for the John Kerry campaign. If it isn’t immediately obvious how big of a middle finger this was, he was pro-choice, and our school paid for kids to go on a bus to Washington every year for the ‘right to life’ march.

My best friend and I wore Kerry/Edwards buttons around school outside of the speech teacher’s class for fear of academic consequences, and responsibly, our parents stopped us from wearing our, ‘Impeach Bush’ t-shirts to school. Jon Stewart allowed two kids that were vastly outnumbered numerically to feel a collective confidence that there was somewhere bigger and better that we could strive to be a part of.

The following year, I started the Democratic and Independent Club along with some like minded peers and a supportive, enthusiastic teacher. There were around fifteen of us in a school of three-hundred, and we met after lunch periodically to discuss politics and the news of the day. None of this would have been possible without the guiding influence of Jon Stewart.

To this day my yearning for truth and the views I seek out to row down the tumultuous river of American life are rooted from the start with Jon Stewart. Luckily others have continued in his lineage, most notably John Oliver with, ‘Last Week Tonight.’ They pay homage to his tradition of truth and comedy as The Kennedy Center honors him with the Mark Twain award for humor this month.

There aren’t a lot of public figures I would genuinely like to say, ‘thank you’ to, but Jon Stewart is one of them. His ability to inspire a generation of what O’Riley frequently called, ‘stoned slackers’ is a testament to not only his greatness but to the possibility of hope and thought as his legacy.