This is an old column article written by Ben Stein. It is his last article that he wrote for his eonline column in 2003. It may be old but the words still ring true and need to be remembered. 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
'eonline 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 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 Mosuleven 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.
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
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein
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After reading the article it made me think of who are the youth of today idolizing. Are there heroes true "stars" or just actors?
Who are the heroes that are praised in your house?
