One of Mike Rowe’s nearly 5 million Facebook followers took a chance by asking the celebrity for words of comfort after Sunday’s mass shooting in Nevada, and he responded in short order.
A Las Vegas resident named Molly Carr turned to America’s “everyman” for advice following the Vegas strip rampage by Stephen Paddock, which killed at least 58 people and wounded over 500 others. Mr. Rowe, whose common-sense approach to problems gained him fame on Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” and CNN’s “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” replied Tuesday in a post that attracted nearly 4 million views.
Mr. Rowe said he was struck by “how unknowingly we rub elbows with evil” and share highways with those “whose capacity for wickedness knows no bounds,” before offering “living proof that hope will never die.”
“Take comfort in men who threw themselves over other people’s children. They are no less real than the killer, and they are still with us,” he said. “Take comfort in the woman who loaded wounded strangers into her car and drove them out of harm’s way. Take comfort in the hundreds of first responders who risk their lives every day, and the hundreds of anonymous citizens who stood in line to give their blood. Take comfort in the fact all good people are shattered, and that you are not alone.
“There are no words, Molly, at least in my vocabulary, to bring you the comfort you seek,” Mr. Rowe continued. “But there are people among us who restore my faith in the species, even as others seek to rob me of it. I can introduce you to those people. That’s what I’ve tried to do with my little slice of cyber space, and that’s what I can do today. The same thing I do every Tuesday.”
The celebrity also confirmed that fan’s statement that she had seen him multiple times in Las Vegas over the years, particularly at the Mandalay Bay Hotel where Mr. Paddock carried out his attack.
“Even before I imagined myself in the thick of the chaos, (as I always do,) and even before I thanked God that I wasn’t, (as I don’t do enough,) I found myself wondering if I had used the same elevator as the killer,” Mr. Rowe wrote. “Isn’t that odd? … Since I’ve ridden all the elevators at Mandalay, I determined that the answer was yes.”
Mr. Rowe currently hosts “Returning The Favor,” a Facebook show that airs each Tuesday on his “search of remarkable people making a difference in their communities.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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