For
many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called "Monday Night At
Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented
by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) 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.
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 "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.. O
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 kin d 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.
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 w ell with my s on, 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. We
take a lot for granted. Forget the Hollywood "stars" and the sprots
"heroes" and pass this page on! God
is watching over us as we read this, may you have blessed days
and evenings. Know the joy of Jesus.
By Tim Pedrosa
Funny
how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.
Man’s
way leads to a hopeless end, God’s way leads to an endless hope.
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Tim
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