Ben Stein

Pima

10-Year Member
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Nov 28, 2007
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Several yrs back while Bullet was at one of Saddams palaces I ran across somethingthat Ben Stein (Feriss Bueller) wrote and it motivated me everyday because I knew that there were people out there that got it! They got us, the military family. Today I ran across a new one and I just wanted to pass both of them along.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1672945/posts
So, here it is Monday morning and I am out in Rancho Mirage in the heat wave. It's not really bad at all in my house. I have the curtains lowered and the air conditioning on, and it's fine. I did have a bit of a problem earlier. My new Cadillac starts without a key. It has something called a "fob" and with that in my pocket I can just press a button and the car starts, jumps hoops, spits out nickels, et cetera.

But somehow I mislaid one of my fobs, so I had to get new ones and that was a bit of pain in this hot weather. Plus, my pool is really too warm to be comfortable. So, that's another problem.

And then I sat down to eat my grapefruit at the table and opened yesterday's New York Times Book Review, and reality slapped me in the face the way it does and it should.

On the cover was the beginning of a breathtakingly horrifying review of a book about the pogroms against Polish Jews after World War II, after the defeat of the Third Reich. Jews rounded up by police, by Boy Scouts, and beaten to death with iron bars. Jews thrown off trains. Jews murdered by anyone who cared to, just in case the Jews did not get the point about how welcome they were in Poland. That could well have been my life and my death.

Then, I turned the page, and there was a lengthy, if confusing, review of a book about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. How it brought back my youth spent listening to "409," "Be True to Your School," and the dozens of other great Beach Boys songs. That was my life. Not being bashed to death with an iron bar by a Polish policeman. Not straggling back from a concentration/death camp to be taunted, "So, Stein, you're still alive," which meant that I would not be alive for long, of course. No, my younger life was riding around in a V-8 1962 Impala that I talked my Pop into buying for me and having crushes on girls who did not like me.

Why? Because of America. Because, as Philip Roth so brilliantly puts it, I live in America the way I live in my skin.

And who made it possible? The nation that armed and fought the Nazis and the Japanese, that ran into Nazi machine gun fire at Omaha Beach to liberate France, that fought some of the worst fighting in history in the Huertgen Forest, that charged into Japanese Nambu bullets on Okinawa to beat the Emperor, that sent its best and brightest to fight the battles that saved the world from a thousand year reign of darkness.

And who still makes it possible for me to have as my main concern the keyless starters on my car? Or the heat today? Who makes it possible? The guy who faces worse heat than this every day with body armor and no air conditioning and brutal killers laying explosives for him and sniping at him -- and her -- at every turn. It is impossible to go out in this heat here in Rancho Mirage. But our soldiers and Marines and Seals and Air Force people do it every day while getting shot at.

God bless this glorious American military, every wife, every child, every parent, and endless prayers for them to return home safe, mission accomplished. God bless them every moment of every day for keeping safe this America, inside of which we live as powerfully as we live in our skin. This has to be the central fact of our lives: gratitude for the men and women who make this great life possible, who wear the uniform and cover it with glory.

From the WSJ http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005508
Dear Karen,

I have a great life. I have a wife I adore, a son who is a lazy teenager but I adore him, too. We live in a house with two dogs and four cats. We live in peace. We can worship as we please. We can say what we want. We can walk the streets in safety. We can vote. We can work wherever we want and buy whatever we want. When we sleep, we sleep in peace. When we wake up, it is to the sounds of birds.

All of this, every bit of it, is thanks to your husband, his brave fellow soldiers, and to the wives who keep the home fires burning while the soldiers are away protecting my family and 140 million other families. They protect Republicans and Democrats, Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists. They protect white, black, yellow, brown and everyone in between. They protect gays and straights, rich and poor.

And none of it could happen without the Army wives, Marine wives, Navy wives, Air Force wives--or husbands--who go to sleep tired and lonely, wake up tired and lonely, and go through the day with a smile on their faces. They feed the kids, put up with the teenagers' surliness, the bills that never stop piling up, the desperate hours when the plumbing breaks and there is no husband to fix it, and the even more desperate hours after the kids have gone to bed, the dishes have been done, the bills have been paid, and the wives realize that they will be sleeping alone--again, for the 300th night in a row.

The wives keep up the fight even when they have to move every couple of years, even when their checks are late, even when they have to make a whole new set of friends every time they move.
And they keep up the fight to keep the family whole even when they feel a lump of dread every time they turn on the news, every time they switch on the computer, every time the phone rings and every time--worst of all--the doorbell rings. Every one of those events--which might mean a baseball score or a weather forecast or a FedEx man to me and my wife--might mean the news that the man they love, the man they have married for better or worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, is now parted from them forever.

These women will never be on the cover of People. They will never be on the tabloid shows on TV about movie stars. But they are the power and the strength that keep America going. Without them, we are nothing at all. With them, we can do everything.

They are the glue that holds the nation together, stronger than politicians, stronger than talking heads, stronger than al Qaeda.

They deserve all the honor and love a nation can give. They have my prayers, and my wife's, every morning and every night.

Love, and I do mean Love, Ben.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have
 
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