[Rhodes22-list] Memorial Day

[Ellner]

Thanks, Brad!   Mary



At 11:15 PM 5/30/2006 -0700, you wrote:
>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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