The benefits of war.

First snow of the year seems joyous, clean, and refreshing, evoking all the softened images of greeting cards and holiday calendars. Dogs on leashes bound after balls on a string or run full out barking for joy of moving and freedom. In a park nearby stands a stately marble monument to America's soldiers and sailors; on this day it is blanketed in a toot of unmarked powder. Beside the monument are ancient canons, on a summer day a climbing place for children but today drifted and icicled, pointing out across the blue-gray flow of the Hudson River and the sunrise-pinked Palisades. It's hard to believe that a couple of hundred years ago George Washington and a rag tag gang of would-be freedom fighters retreated from the British army to a stand just a few miles up river from here, maybe even shivered in the chill wind off the water as this morning's joggers do.

Don't you imagine that the young soldiers in our country-building had parents or grandparents who advised them to give up this nonsense and get a real job? (How often that phrase reoccurs!) Many colonists were content to maintain the status quo, to remain comfortable in their homes and positions and be governed by a mad king, to go along and get along. Only those who saw that their future could be different, or those driven by a burning passion, were eager to rebel from the old patterns and give their energy and lives to choreographing a new method.

John Selya dances in a different war, one that will now be remembered by many through Billy Joel's songs and Twyla Tharp's choreography on Broadway. Our role in Vietnam was very different from our own rebellion and fight to establish our independence as a country. In Southeast Asia it was rather a clash of cultures and values, and from that a struggle for dominance; in the United States it was also a struggle for those whom World War I politicians called "those who also stand and wait." Selya's electric characterization and stunning dance performance in Movin' Out are now his "regular job." A risktaker in real life, he surfs the edge of possibility in dance as on the ocean's waves [see story on page 32].

One side effect of foreign invasions is the encounter of other races and cultures, up close and real, so a tolerance and better understanding of other colors, voices, religions, and dances results. We bring that information home and break down our own prejudices and racial and cultural barriers [see story on page 54]. Modern communication and global travel increase. Old labels and epithets then seem ridiculous.

Though Presidents' Day is often obscured by Valentine's Day in February, remember to cast a thought back at George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, those endlessly transitioning diplomatic dancers who eschewed "a real job" and took great risks to benefit us all.