Not all people have the physical courage of Saint Francis, but some do. I’m an Army brat proud of my father’s service to our country and proud of my son Evan who began yesterday pre-Ranger School training at Fort Bragg. I received just now a copy of this email my brother Sean sent to our father. It deserves a wider audience. Hat tip to Sean Royal Ellsworth, West Chester, PA.

Dad,

I want to share this personal, related story. Last month while boarding a plane in Dallas to fly back to Philadelphia I observed a young E-1 Air Force Airman take a seat in coach about three rows in front of me. Many fellow citizens were thanking him for his service and just being generally accommodating to the men in uniform on the flight (you gotta love Texans!). As the flight attendants were preparing for take off I saw two of them approach this young serviceman and could tell they were asking him for something in particular. It was taking some coaxing on their part so my interest grew then I saw an older gentleman stand up in first class as the young airman walked toward the front of the plane in his combat dress unform. These two men exchanged a heartfelt handshake and I then knew that the older man was giving up his first class seat for him. This struck many people in the plane as they observed this and the older gentleman received some high fives as he made his way back toward the back of the plane. Afterward as we walked toward baggage claim in Philly I shook the older man’s hand and thanked him for his excellent act of citizenship and leadership that made such a lasting impression on so many on the flight. He told me he was a young E-1 Airman once and served 22 years in the Air Force and will never forget these young servicemen and women.

Share these stories. Look for these divine appointments in your day as they can make a lasting impression on those around you. Veterans Day is in 35 days. Maybe you are being “called” to do something special this fall for somebody in your neighborhood or community that is serving our country or has a son or daughter serving.  Maybe next time you are in an airport and you see young servicemen in line for some food or something to drink you tell the cashier to put it on your tab.

Professor William A. Read, a distinguished linguist, put it this way in a journal of philology: “The pronunciation of educated Americans is in many respects more archaic than that of educated Englishmen.” This should be no surprise, he said, since “the phonetic basis of American pronunciation rests chiefly on the speech of Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” And those Englishmen sounded much like the Americans of today. The “English accent” that we now associate with educated British speech is a relatively new phenomenon and didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Look at the way the letter r is pronounced (or not pronounced), perhaps the most important difference in the speech of educated people in the US and the UK. Since Anglo-Saxon days, the English had pronounced the r in words like “far,” “mother,” “world,” “church,” and “mourn.” English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the r’s in these words when the Colonies broke away from England. Most Americans still do. But educated people in Britain began dropping their r’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Americans most likely to drop their r’s were those, like New Englanders, who had strong commercial and social ties with the mother country.

This dropping of r’s in Britain didn’t happen all of a sudden, and the sticklers of the day didn’t take it lying down. “The perception that the language was ‘losing a letter’ was a cause of profound upset to some writers,” the linguist David Crystal has written. The poet Keats, for example, was cruelly upbraided by critics for rhyming “thoughts” with “sorts,” and “thorns” with “fawns.” Lord Byron blamed a critical article for hastening Keats’s death in 1821: “‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.” But by the time Keats died, the dropped r was a standard feature of educated British pronunciation.

The other letter that’s a dead giveaway in telling a Brit from a Yank is the a in a word like “past.” We all know how an American would say it — with an a like the one in “cat.” And as anyone who’s watched Masterpiece Theatre can tell you, the standard British pronunciation is PAHST. But it wasn’t always so. The Brits used to say it the same way Americans do now. Here again, the Americans stuck with an old way of speaking, one the British abandoned about the same time they dropped their r’s.

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from Stiff Upper Lips by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman

Finally, we are required to do something that it seems rather odd to have to say. We have to re-discover some confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we’ve come and what we believe in. By the way, I think this even about the economic crisis. It is severe. It’s going to be really, really hard. But we will get through it and not by abandoning the market or open economic system but by learning our lessons and adjusting the system in a way that makes it better. But on any basis, this system has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn’t, amongst the gloom, forget it.

The same is true for the security threat we face. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that has given us this liberty, to speak and think as we wish, that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space infinitely more transparent than anything that went before ; that body isn’t decaying. It is in the prime of life. It is the future. And though the extremists that confront us have their new adherents, we have ours too, nations democratic for the first time, people tasting freedom and liking it.

And that is why we should not revert to the foreign policy of years gone by, of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be.

We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced. Here is where I remain adamantly in the same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of ten years ago, that evening in this city. The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It’s all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who’s on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.

But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last thirty years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?

Or to form alliances with any regime, however bad, because they solve ‘today’ without asking whether they will imperil ‘tomorrow’? This isn’t statesmanship. It is just politics practiced for the most comfort and the least disturbance in the present moment.

I never thought such politics very sensible or practical. I think it even less so now. We live in the era of interdependence; the idea that if we let a problem fester, it will be contained within its boundaries no longer applies. That is why leaving Africa to the ravages of famine, conflict and disease is not just immoral but immature in its political understanding. Their problems will become ours.

And this struggle we face now cannot be defeated by staying out; but by sticking in, abiding by our values not retreating from them.

It is a cause that must be defeated by a better cause. That cause is one of open, tolerant, outward-looking societies in which people respect diversity and difference in which peaceful co-existence can flourish. It is a cause that has to be fought for; with hearts and minds as well as arms, of course. But fought for, nonetheless with the courage to see it through and the confidence that the cause is just, right and the only way the future of our world can work.

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You can read the whole speech at tonyblairoffice.org

LAKELAND, Fla. — Carlos Ruiz is the starting catcher for the defending world champion Philadelphia Phillies. He has caught and faced pitchers of the best caliber at the highest levels of competition. On Wednesday, Ruiz saw Rick Porcello pitch for the first time. ”He has a good arm and a strong fastball, and his sinker is unbelievable,” Ruiz said. “From what I saw today, if he stays healthy, he will be in the big leagues for a long time.”

Porcello, in his first big-league start of any kind, faced Ruiz’s Panama team, which is headed to this weekend’s first round of the World Baseball Classic. Panama won, 9-3, but Porcello did his part. In his two-inning stint, Porcello faced each hitter in the lineup once. Ruiz pulled a grounder to third on a sinker. No one else hit the ball out of the infield against Porcello, either. ”He’s not afraid to pitch inside,” Ruiz said. “That’s something that is key.”

Porcello allowed one hit (an infield single) and no runs. He walked two and struck out three, all with someone on base. The first strikeout came with runners on second and third and one out in the first. He threw one of those unbelievable sinkers, and Panama’s cleanup hitter swung and missed. Porcello is making what manager Jim Leyland calls a longshot bid to win the vacancy in the Tigers’ rotation. Porcello is a longshot not because of his stuff, but because he’s 20 with just one year in pro ball.

today’s Freep

Without question, there are important human goods (especially material ones) that the United States provides more abundantly than any nation on earth, but to make too much of these goods is to misunderstand the nature of human flourishing. Many of my friends in high school and college assumed that what Americans most valued—socially, politically, or economically—was always in itself most valuable. Of course nobody would say that America contains everything of value. But sometimes Americans do seem to think that the absorbent power of democratic capitalism allows the nation to incorporate whatever is really any good about anyplace else. Why would anyone want the thickness of Indian society, when, even without it, they could have Indian engineers, saris, and samosas?

The dogma of American superiority makes many of its citizens defensive and humorless when faced with serious national failings, past or present. A too-earnest plea of extenuating circumstances or a rancorous tu quoque is generally judged sufficient, but sometimes the defense becomes more elaborate. Once in American history class, for instance, I noted the irony that the British abolished slavery before their rebellious colonies did (and without an orgy of bloodshed). In reply, someone suggested that I had ignored a counterbalancing fact: British abolitionists couldn’t invoke the natural-rights language of the Declaration of Independence.

In other words, what America officially aspires to be trumps what it demonstrably is. As Barack Obama said when he won the 2008 election, “That is the true genius of America—that America can change. Our union can be perfected.” Unlike, apparently, France, England, or Sweden.

The fervor of the republican faith naturally tends to backfire in the form of dramatic apostasies—which is why America has always produced some of the world’s fiercest anti-Americans. As the historian Walter McDougall once remarked, America is “not a lie, but a disappointment.”

But these criticisms should not obscure the fact that I feel unshakable loyalty and intense love for this country. I love the United States because I agree with Richard John Neuhaus that, on balance, considering all the alternatives, America is a force for good in the world. I am convinced that the glee many feel at the prospect of America’s fall is shortsighted idiocy.

Stefan McDaniel in First Things