Tuesday

The world is going crazy. Just plain crazy. Russia invades a sovereign state, Ukraine, without any provocation. The USA sends weapons to Ukraine, but clearly not enough. The Russians are now shown to be mass-murdering civilians in Ukraine and burying them in mass graves, Nazi and Bolshevik style.

Amazingly, some on the right, supposedly on the right, like Tucker Carlson, whom I once loved and adored, stand up for Mass Murderer Comrade Putin. Mr. Carlson says this is because Comrade Putin never called him a racist. This is genuinely insane. It amounts to saying that if Charles Manson had never called him a racist, Mr. Carlson could admire him, too. What the hell is going on when because a murderer doesn’t call a man a racist, he gets off without criticism for murder?

And why aren’t we sending more and better weapons to Ukraine? Since when did it become a bad thing to help a small nation that has never offended us when it is invaded and brutalized by a nation with evident butchery?

I applauded Mr. Biden when he called Comrade Putin a war criminal. But as the president of Ukraine said, “We need ammunition, not words.” What on Earth is stopping us? (READ MORE from Ben Stein: A Hitler for Our Atomic Age)

And in the meantime and in the in-between time, please allow me to change the subject. I dreamed last night I was returning from summer camp and my father was waiting for me in the kind of business suit he often wore: a faint check with a white shirt and a repp tie. And always black lace-up shoes. He looked thin and fit and was smiling at me and holding out his arms to embrace me. “You look so thin,” I said to him. “How much weight have you lost?”

And then I awakened. (Not “woke.”) No father. Just my great SiriusXM radio playing songs from the 1950s. I was in shock. My father “died” 22 years ago or maybe more. I walked to my wife’s room, and we both cried about our missing parents.

Friends, if you have living fathers and mothers, get on your knees right now and thank God. Nothing hurts more than losing your parents, your children, or your siblings. While we have them, let’s talk to them every day, praise them, bury them in love. Nothing is as good as good family. Nothing stings as hard as losing them.

The sting never goes away.