Ben Stein on Memorial Day

A MUST READ...

Excerpt:
(Speaking of the fallen:)

Your loved ones' lives had what we all want: meaning. The knowledge you were doing something big for others. That is EVERYTHING in life.

Wall Street does not have it. Hollywood does not have it. They're just in it for the fame and the money.

Your loved ones were in it for unselfishness, for kindness, for love of one's fellow man. There is no higher meaning on this earth.

The media try to rob your husbands' and wives' and kids' lives of meaning saying this war is not about anything.

They're wrong and they say what they say because they don't see the truth. They print a story on the front page about Marines killing civilians in a town in Iraq and if they did, it was wrong. But the big media never report a MARINE throwing himself on a bomb to protect an Iraqi child, or a Marine giving his life to rid a town of murderers or a Marine or an Army man or woman or a Navy Seal or a Coast Guardsman offering up his life so that Iraqi human beings can have the same freedoms and rights we take for granted here in America.

The media are like grave robbers, robbing you of the certain knowledge that your spouses gave their lives for something deeply worthwhile: human dignity.

Your loved ones' lives and deaths had as much meaning at the lives and deaths of every American who died for freedom from Valley Forge to the Battle of the Bulge to Cho-Sin Reservoir to the Cu Chi tunnels to the Balkans to Kabul, Afghanistan, to Falluja, Iraq.

And if the media doesn't know it, every other American does. This is a very difficult fight, but the ordinary American knows what your loved ones have done and respects them.

Your families, your loved one, your children have more respect than Sean Penn and Barbra Streisand and the Dixie Chicks all put together times a million. And the media like to criticize because they know -- in their hearts -- that they will never have the guts that the man and woman in uniform have. I think media envy of your loved ones' courage has a lot do with media mockery of the war.

To heck with them. ....