In a recent interview, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the famous Russian (actually, Latvian) ballet dancer who defected (or as he puts it, "selected" himself) to the West in 1974, talks about the flow of his life and how he has come to this point in it (he is 76).  "What I have done," he said, "is called a crime in Russia.  But my life is my art, and I realized it would be a greater crime to destroy that."

    If we deny people the freedom to create, we commit the greatest crime of all.  We make what is a wonderfully amazing fount of imagination into something that is no more than an object, an object  whose worth is measured not by its potential but by our whims, categories, biases, and predilections.

    This is something that Russia's current leader, Vladimir Putin, ignores regularly.  As Baryshnikov says, "He's a true imperialist with a totally bizarre sense of power."

    Power is not strength or aggrandizement.  Power is doing what we can to enable people to be who God created them to be.

    To glorify our incredible capacity to create.