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For many
years Ben Stein (comedian, actor, and TV personality) has written a
biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night at
Morton's".
Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his
life. Reading his final column to our military is worth a few minutes
of your time because it praises the most unselfish among us; our military
personnel, others who protect us daily, and portrays a valuable lesson
learned in his life.
Ben Stein's Last Column...
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How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say,
which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This
heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write
it.
I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall
when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came
to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually,
my changing as a person and the world's changes have overtaken it.
On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts
as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves
and definitely some stars.
I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit.
And right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty
in an elevator, during which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was
a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though
it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood
stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly
people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a
man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting
them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we
should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane
luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we
mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches
or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while
they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me
any longer.
A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his
head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met
by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets.
Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all
of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who
was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached
it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S.
soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded
ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station.
He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He
left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish
weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after
two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped
for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of
our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military
pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines
near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such
poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending
that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament....the policemen
and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if
they will return alive,
The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible
accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who
throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind
men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each
and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center
as the towers began to collapse.
Now you have my idea of a real hero. We are not responsible for the
operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important.
God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him,
he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.
In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors
of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that
matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.
I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as
great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin....or Martin
Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman
or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of
them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above
all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.
This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with
my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with
my sister's help).
I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed
with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma
and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers
in Iraq or the firefighters in New York.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that
matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has
devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path.
This is my highest and best use as a human.
By Ben Stein
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