[Rhodes22-list] Memorial Day

brad haslett flybrad at yahoo.com
Wed May 31 00:15:28 EDT 2006


OK folks, last post I promise.  I'm trying to wind
down for bed after a wonderful Memorial Day weekend in
New England.  Fan and Cora flew into Boston and joined
me in Manchester. We drove along the New Hampshire and
Maine coast and let Cora dip her toes in the Atlantic
for the first time.  Here's something I stumbled
across in my bedtime reading.  Ben Stein, in addition
to being funny, is a pretty good financial advisor as
well.  Brad

-------------------------------

  Memorial Day Diary 
By Ben Stein  
Published 5/30/2006 12:10:33 AM 

 
 MEMORIAL DAY -- My brain is just exploding this
morning with emotions about Memorial Day, and I have
to get some of them down or I will lose what's left of
my mind.

Saturday night I was in Arlington, Virginia, at the
annual meeting of the Tragedy Assistance Program for
Survivors. This is a fine group founded by Bonnie
Carroll to get widows, widowers, mothers, fathers, and
children of men and women who have died in the war on
terrorism together. Last year I spoke and there were
about 500 people in the audience. Saturday there were
700.

Bonnie Carroll, a stone genius, spoke gloriously.
Magnificently. An angel of oratory. A staggeringly
beautiful woman named Joanne Wrobleski, who had just
been married to her husband for two years, spoke with
power and rage and healing as a projector showed
photos of her wedding to her astonishingly handsome
husband. It was enough to melt a marble pillar.

A woman next to me named Mrs. Beard told about losing
her son, Bradley. I asked her if she worked at a job.
She said she used to be a bank teller, "but that after
I lost my son, counting people's money didn't seem
that important anymore." Her husband, a homebuilder,
looked distraught. Their beautiful daughter played the
piano and sang songs she had composed of peace and
loss.

At every table, we passed around boxes of Kleenex
continuously.

I spoke briefly and talked about how the loved ones
missing from this dinner were the only people doing
meaningful work in the world today as far as I could
tell. The media try to tell us their work has no
meaning, and when the media do this, it's almost like
grave robbing.

Anyway, I spoke and then I hugged widows and bereft
mothers for about an hour and a half. A man named
Nolan Rappaport who has been a close friend since 1956
accompanied me and took photos. He was very patient
and when I thanked him for his patience, he said,
poetically, "I don't feel as if the time was lost."

When I got back to Los Angeles, I started to read a
book I can't finish, called A Writer at War by Vassily
Grossman, a correspondent with the Red Army newspaper
during World War II.

The part I can't get past is the atrocities of the
Germans towards the Jews when they took the Ukraine in
the early part of World War II. One incident just
haunts me every day.

The Germans came upon a kosher butcher. They asked him
if he were really a good butcher. He said he hoped he
was. They brought his two small sons to him and said,
"Show us. On your sons."

I keep putting the book down at this point and
wondering, "Why did God bother making creatures as
wicked as man?"

Then I picked up a book of interviews with Bob Dylan.
They were interesting. He's a clever con man and
huckster and poet of the obscure and sometimes the
meaningless. It's called The Essential Bob Dylan
Interviews, edited by a man named Jonathan Cott. I
recommend it. I also have with me a book called Heart
of a Hawk about coping with losing a son in Iraq. It's
by a woman I met at the event on Saturday, a lovely
soul named Deb Tainsh. I have already read it and it's
major stuff about loss and faith and pain.

And I thought, well, here's Bob Dylan, making jokes
and making fun of his interviewers and he's a Jew. And
here I am sitting at my computer with my dogs snoring
nearby and my palm trees and my bottled water. And I'm
a Jew. And why do we -- Jews and Gentiles here in
America -- get to do what we do instead of being
killed by the Nazis or the Islamic terrorists?

Because of Bonnie Carroll's husband and Bonnie
Carroll. Because of Joanne Wrobleski and her hero
husband. Because of all of the men and women at
Arlington National Cemetery and on ocean floors and
blown to bits in forests and muddy trenches. Because
God made Eichmann, but he also made Bradley Beard and
Dale Denman, Jr.

More are dying as we speak every day in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

How do we ever make it up to them? How can we ever pay
them back? Above all, by taking the loved ones they
left behind into our arms, into our hearts, and loving
them forever. And by making sure that when they die,
their deaths are known to have meaning.

We would be nothing without them. Nothing. And somehow
I feel as if my brain were still on fire.


Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer
living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. 
 
 


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