Worth reading
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For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column
for the on-line web site 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...
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
"e-online FINAL," 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 change 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, in 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. 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 and 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
very 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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Seriously can I use my object desktop on two computers? One at home where I am obvoiusly not, and one here downrange? Mormegil's theme sure would spruce up the place around here. Nothing but brown and tan here 
So sorry to hear what you have been going through... you are handling it admirably. Thank you for all you have done.