So cool

On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history. The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet. Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention. He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette. He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents. A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

"If you want to hate America, watch the news. If you want to love America, drive across it." foxnews.com/lifestyle/world-…

I feel like I need to go back to college just to bolster moral for professors and show the kids how it’s done.

Love this outsider perspective on the USPS and the privilege it is to have a postal system that works like ours. I think I need to send more letters.

For tonight's Spell in the Library I read you a little known gem from Tolkien's Collected Poems youtu.be/wzytzm8IlnA

I watch this every time it comes up on my feed. I love it so much. There is nothing like the thrill of watching a horse run like this horse does.

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

June 6th, 1944. The English Channel is angry and half the men in the landing craft are seasick. Diesel fumes mix with saltwater and vomit while rifles are checked for the fifth or sixth time by hands that need something to do. Nobody talks much anymore because the jokes have all been told and the bravado has finally burned away somewhere behind the English coast. You are nineteen years old and carrying more weight than you’ve ever carried in your life. You don’t know it yet, but it’s the most weight you will EVER carry in this life. However long or short it may be. Your rifle rests across your knees. Your life hangs from a few pounds of steel, wood, and training. Somewhere beyond the gray horizon sits a continent that has spent five years tearing itself apart, and in a few minutes you are going to step into the middle of it. Across from you sits another kid. He can’t be much older than you. His jaw is clenched. His knuckles are white around his weapon. Neither of you says a word because there is nothing left to say. Then your eyes drift toward his shoulder. That red numeral catches your eye: “1”. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. In barracks hallways, on training fields, in motor pools, and on long marches. It never meant much beyond belonging to the same outfit. Now it means everything. Because in a few minutes the world is going to ask something terrible of both of you, and there is comfort in knowing that whatever waits on that beach, neither of you will face it alone. The historians will eventually reduce this day to arrows on maps and casualty figures. Politicians will give speeches. Journalists will write books. None of that exists inside the landing craft. What exists is fear, and duty. What exists is the understanding that courage was never the absence of fear. Courage was always charging into the maelstrom anyway. The shoreline emerges through the smoke. You can see flashes now. You can hear the distant percussion of artillery. Men stop checking their equipment because there is no point anymore. Whatever mistakes were made are already made. Whatever prayers were going to be said have already been said. The coxswain throttles down. The boat grinds forward. The ramp is about to drop. Into the abyss. Overlord.

As I've pondered this over the last few days, I keep thinking about something Clay Jones wrote. In his book, "Why Does God Allow Evil?", Jones points out that when we think of genocide, we think of demented psychopaths running around on murderous rampages. In reality, genocide is mostly committed by normal everyday people including moms, dads, and sweet grandmas who bake cookies for the bake sale. Jones writes: "It has been fascinating to me that absolutely every genocide researcher I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot of them) and absolutely every genocide victim I’ve ever read—to a person—concludes that genocide is what the average person does... Professor and Holocaust survivor Fred E. Katz sums up exactly what kind of person participated in the Holocaust. He wrote that 'only a tiny proportion' of the 'massive killings are attributable to the actions of those people we call criminals, or crazy people, or socially alienated people, or even, people we identify as evil people.' Rather, they were actually 'carried out by plain folk in the population—ordinary people, like you and me.' Katz asks, Who carried out the plans of the 'Hitlers and Stalins'? His conclusion: 'Ordinary people, like you and me.' Then he asks, 'Who provides the intelligence, the brain power, the orderly thinking to translate crazy philosophies into a practical course of action? Ordinary people, like you and me.' Finally, 'Who provides the quiet sustained effort, the plain hard work it takes to carry out huge programs of murderous action? Ordinary people, like you and me.'" One of the reasons the post below is so chilling and horrifically evil is because it is so casual, ordinary, and "nice." May God have mercy on us.

The courage of a man to save the world with a daring and risky plan - knowing it could fail - and still prepare to take the blame if it did fail.

The richest man in America signed a document that could have gotten him hanged, and when someone sneered that he was safe because no one would know which Charles Carroll to come for, he picked up the pen and told the British exactly where to find him. His name was Charles Carroll, and the colonies were crawling with men who shared it. His own father was Charles Carroll of Annapolis. So when the Declaration of Independence came to him for signing in 1776, a delegate made a cruel little joke. He said Carroll risked nothing by signing. There were so many Charles Carrolls that the King's men would never know which one to hang. Carroll didn't argue. He leaned over the page and added three words to his signature: "of Carrollton." The name of his estate. His address. He was the only signer in the entire room who wrote down where he lived, and he did it on purpose, so that if the British wanted to come hang the traitor, they would know exactly which door to knock on. That is who Charles Carroll of Carrollton was. Here is what makes the moment even sharper. He was not a man with little to lose. He was the single wealthiest man in the thirteen colonies and the largest private landowner among them. While George Washington and John Hancock get talked about as rich men, it was Carroll who topped them all. When he signed, he was wagering the biggest personal fortune in America against a noose. And he was the last man anyone would have expected to be there at all. Carroll was Catholic. In colonial Maryland, a colony founded as a Catholic refuge that had since turned on its own, Catholics could not vote. They could not hold public office. They could not worship in public. The most educated, wealthiest man in America was, in the eyes of the law, a second-class subject barred from the very government he was helping to create. He had spent seventeen years being educated by Jesuits in France and spoke five languages fluently, and back home he still could not legally cast a ballot. So he became the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, putting his name on a revolution that he hoped would build a country with room for men like him. That was its own enormous bet, made by a man the existing system had already shut out. Then he simply outlived everyone. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same astonishing day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration. When they were gone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last living signer left on earth. For six more years he was the final human link to that room in Philadelphia, the last hand that had signed, a living relic of the founding that ordinary Americans traveled to see and shake. He finally died in November 1832 at the age of ninety-five, fifty-six years after he wrote his address on a treason document and dared the empire to come find him. The richest man in America. The only Catholic. The last one standing. He had more to lose than any of them, every legal reason to stay quiet, and he signed his full address anyway. We remember the names we were handed in school. We forget the man who made sure his couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's. Which Founding Father do you think history shortchanged the most?

Re-enchant the world with good stories.

"What a mercy it is that it is not your hold of Christ that saves you, but his hold of you!" — Charles Spurgeon

I have never quite learned this lesson and had it stick.

Along with a book collecting problem I have a plant collecting problem. I can keep most alive, and my orchids bloom regularly. But now I want a pitcher plant. I saw one at a plant store recently and I am obsessed. Can I keep it alive?

I too have this addiction.

I have my eye on a 1991 World Book Encyclopedia set but haven’t pulled the trigger. Do I need more books or a whole encyclopedia set? No. But I need strangers to validate my purchase. Should I buy them?