By Ben Stein on 5.29.08 @ 12:08AM
Reflections occasioned this past Memorial Day weekend.
Here I am in my swimming pool in Beverly Hills, lazily swimming
laps back and forth at midnight. I can see the stars above my palm
trees and cedars. The dogs are loping around the back yard sniffing
for squirrels. My wife is upstairs drinking the Cuervo Gold or
whatever it is.
I am thinking about a conversation I had a couple of hours ago
with my pal Phil DeMuth. He said that basically, what we had to
realize was that our freedom, our prosperity, our opportunity, our
rule of law, came from 19 year olds carrying around M-16's. He was
quoting from a fine book called Grunts.
This idea is burning like wildfire in my brain. Here we all are,
living like kings, living like maharajahs, and what's keeping us
alive? Kids from small towns in Pennsylvania and Iowa and Wyoming
and the Central Valley of California. And their parents and their
wives and their kids, many of them now widows and orphans. I saw
about a thousand of those wives and kids over Memorial Day weekend
in Crystal City, Virginia, at the Tragedy Assistance Program for
Survivors (TAPS) event. If I had to pick the finest people I have
ever met in my life, it would be the wives -- widows -- and kids --
orphans -- and Moms and Dads and husbands of those superstars. You
cannot imagine the looks of pride and pain on their faces. Blessed
of God, is all I can say.
No, wait. I have to include the men and women in Walter Reed and
Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital and Landstuhl and every other
military hospital. Wounded in body, but as brave as they make a
human being. Stars in the firmament of history.
When I am alone in my pool, I think of them, alone in their beds
of pain. And not only them: How about the policemen and state
troopers and highway patrol and sheriffs and prison guards? How
about everyone who stands between the weak, pitiful good people and
the strong, vicious thugs who want to kill us, rape our wives, take
what we have? How about all of them getting some credit once in a
while? How about thanking the police once in a blue moon instead of
damning them?
There is simply not enough time and blood in this world to thank
these people and their families adequately. It is not the President
who keeps us free, not the Congress, not the press, not the courts.
It is the men and women who offer up their lives for us.
God bless them and their hero families for all eternity. Just
for today, I am not going to think about my own pitiful, selfish
self for a few hours. Instead, I will get to the safest place I
know of -- my knees in prayer -- to thank God for these saints in
armor.
topics:
Law, Military
