SwiftVets.com

[Mary Ann Parker]

WELL SAID BEN!
Please read. You will be blessed.
Mary Ann Parker
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[/b]For many years Ben Stein 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 is worth a few minutes of your time
because it praises the most unselfish among us; our military personnel and 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 "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 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. 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 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 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

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

[rainvet]

Amem and may GOD take care of them always and it want be too far off until the LORD return to get his Church. GOD Bless our land and the USA.