Guest Blog - Sort Of

I saw this article at another blog site and thought it would make a great follow up piece to my last post. It is written by Ben Stein who portrayed the monotonic teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He is an accomplished writer, attorney, and law professor. (A pretty interesting guy) Anyway, this article struck a chord with me as my son is now enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Enjoy.

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.

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 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.

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.

What I Believe

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh recently. (OK, keep reading.) He was talking about a speech he gave to the Conservative Political Action Conference. He said he does all of his speeches virtually extemporaneously because he does not need a teleprompter to tell him what he believes. He said his core beliefs are so ingrained in his being he knows them by heart.
That got me thinking. Do I have a set of core beliefs that are so ingrained in my being I could boil them down to a few well delivered points? If a stranger approached me on the street would I be able to articulate in less than five minutes What I Believe? (Notice the capital letters. They are on purpose to differentiate Important Core Values vs. other things I happen to believe. Like: two ply is better than one; and small yappy dogs are annoying). How do I take a subject this important and do it justice? Luckily, last night I had a dream. I happen to come up with some of my best ideas while dreaming. With your indulgence, here is my list.

1) God is in heaven. Whether I believe in Him or not does not change who he is and where he is.
2) God loves me. Whether I acknowledge him or not his character does not change.
3) There will be judgment. (Keep reading.) People don’t like this one. We have become too comfortable with the notion we can do our own thing as long as our actions don’t hurt anyone else. The problem with that is modern culture does not dictate truth. And the truth is one day I will have to give an account for my actions on earth. Either I will be eternally separated from God, or ushered into his very presence in paradise. This leads to number four.
4) Jesus. One word. I don’t have enough time or space here to describe the significance of this one word. People spend their whole lives studying the spiritual, historical, and personal consequences of this word. Suffice it to say Jesus is the foundation of my faith and central to everything else I believe in. As it relates to the above, Jesus said of himself: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me". (John 14:6) Whether I accept it or not, this is the truth. Which leads to number five.
5) Choice. Choice is an action. We consciously weigh the risks and rewards or our choices and act upon them every day. I’ve thought a lot about one through four above. I choose to believe, or not. I choose to acknowledge, or not. I choose to accept, or not. And what I choose regarding one through four above has eternal consequences. I’ve weighed the risks and rewards and made my choice.
If you haven’t done it already, I encourage you to write down a list of your core beliefs. The very act of making a list gives clarity to your beliefs. It refines them and makes them more “real” to you. The list may change over time, as it should. We grow in wisdom and deepen our understanding of things around us – seen and unseen. Plus, a list allows us to speak extemporaneously to the Things That Really Matter, without needing a teleprompter.