Ben Stein's Last Column

BEN STEIN'S LAST COLUMN
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the
online website 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... (read all of this or you will have missed
the best part ).
=========================================== 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 i. This
heading is one line 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 ha! s 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, Iaq. 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 an d 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 comfo! rtable being a part of the ystem 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 operatio of the u 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 wit 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