I get all warm and fuzzy when someone speaks about dance and the arts with a combination of passion and intelligence. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a neighbor of national historic dance site Jacob’s Pillow, recently gave a talk there and offered words like these:
“Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war.  Sometimes
in elected office.  And those are the ways of serving our country that I
think we are trained to easily call heroic.  It’s also a service to your
country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly
dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in
the schools.  A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy,
without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and
given the choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at
what they do, is a country that is not actually as great as it could be.
And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not
being a great country.  It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is
heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to
have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness.”