posted 02-02-2005 05:13 PM         

Ben Stein's Last Column

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

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.

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?

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 striped 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 police men
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 and
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 tur! n over our lives to Him, He
takes far better care of us than we co uld 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 a 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.

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

By Ben Stein

posted 02-03-2005 09:16 PM         

The young people in our military represent the very best of the United States and they make us all extremely proud!