It’s nice to see America take steps forward.  But watching America try to link these steps together in consecutive motion is like watching a small child learn to walk.  With each step it takes, it gains confidence but loses balance until one step sends it over the edge and it comes toppling down, angry, confused and back where it started.  Sure, maybe sometimes we overstep, or try to take things too quickly, but if we cannot learn to compensate for that then we can never make any real progress.

But it looked as if we were making real progress; we were taking steps forward without faltering.  Hundreds of Thousands of American, French, and global supporters alike took to the streets, “Je suis Charlie” plastered, printed and painted on signs, posters, and banners. The hashtag #jesuischarlie shared millions of times by Americans on social media.  We stood for something, we had a purpose, and we knew what it was.  It was freedom of press, but moreover, it was freedom of speech.

However, freedom of speech is not something that is reserved for an occasion.  It is something that, whether the opinion of the public supports it or not, applies to everything.  So when the world famous sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live published a (relatively tame for SNL) sketch parodying a car commercial by exchanging the U.S. military personnel for ISIS militants with machine guns, the public outrage that followed could be considered surprising.  With America and the world one step forward with their reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, it might seem strange that something as mild as a SNL skit could cause such outrage.  But it did, and thus, America faltered in its step once more and is now back where it started.

The real question, however, is not what caused us to falter in our step, but why it caused it.  The SNL sketch featuring Dakota Johnson, the star of the recently released Fifty Shades of Grey (a movie which is essentially about BDSM, which it seems the American public is totally fine with), is not overly offensive and doesn’t even depict any real acts of terror.  In fact, the text on the side of ISIS possessed machine gun truck does not even translate to anything relating to terrorism, but to “I love cats.”

Some people are ridiculing SNL for making a joke out of ISIS, saying that it undermines ISIS’s power.  But there is a difference between ridiculing and making a joke out of, and I can think of no organization more deserving of ridicule than ISIS.  ISIS, however scary they may be to the average person, is an organization that deserves to be ridiculed and laughed at, and no matter how many times America stumbles and falls, we will keep moving forward, one step at a time.