BEN STEIN'S LAST COLUMN

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for
the on-line web site called "Monday Night At Morton's", from
that famous restaurant which was often frequented by
Hollywood Stars. Now, Ben is terminating the column to move
on to other things in his life. Reading his final column
about our military and other priceless people 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 "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