“O, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work ”” paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.
“O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work ”” because mothers work now and always have worked ”” and your parents must say, ”˜Yes, sir,’ or ”˜No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ”˜sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.
“Be smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don’t act as if it’s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, ”˜Thank you for what you do so I can live like this.’ Say something. Say it, so that when they’re at O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they’ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they’ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.
Ben Stein is one of the geniuses of our times. Thanks for posting this, Kendall!
Wow…thanks for that!
And he’s a delightful man!
And of course these very kids he’s talking about now run our Church.
Am I off base? I read the whole thing and it sounds more like a big dose of the Ben Stein guilt trip being laid down. The only part I like is the “Be a better person than I ever was.” Unfortunately that might translate in a kid’s mind to read “Don’t slave away for your kids like I did or they will turn out like you.”
On the other hand, I DO like Ben’s wry humor!
Actually, pewster, what I read is his admonishing the kids “don’t hate or look down on your parents for sacrificing for you — it’s what made you able to be what you are today”.
Peace
Jim Elliott
Well, Mr. Stein is addressing the upper-middle class ‘kids’ who didn’t have to work their way thru school, or borrow their way thru, or apply for financial aid….because their upper-middle class parents were making solid money, and chose to spend it on their children, rather than themselves (personally, I wonder how many of the parents were assured of a retirement because they work(ed) for one level of government or another).
I am sometimes sympathetic to Ben Stein, but too often (as here) he seems quite limited, to a particular white, economically privileged demographic. (Wannabet what percentage of these parents benefited from the GOP tax cuts of recent years?)
Though, he makes an excellent point to those particular ‘kids’. They need to ‘grow up’ and take responsibility. So, from that limited vantage point, good for him! Middle class and working class and non-working class kids had to ‘grow up’ a very long time ago; time YOU did, also!