Travels and Battles (last part)

After our battlefield visit our battles really began. Our plan was to stay the night, arise early to catch a train for Washington, D.C. (the raison d'etre for the trip, at least for Francis and Michael), meet Martin, and see the sights in our nation's capital. This is what happened.

Michael, ever curious, locks the bathroom door from the inside and closes it from the outside. The hotel can not reopen the door. We change rooms. The clock in the room is a half hour slow. We miss the train. We have breakfast. We drive to intercept the train at another stop. We miss that by a minute or two. We drive to a metro stop which is also a train stop so that on the way back to our car we can take the train for about twenty minutes.

The rest of the trip, including meeting Martin and sight seeing, went exceedingly well. Global warming or a freakish March warm spell caused all the cherry blossoms to sprout long before our visit. We did see some cherry blossom petals on the ground. While not "hana-mi", they were lovely.

I had my eye on the computer games graphics exhibit, but instead we visited the National Museum of American History. In this day of "all knowledge on the web" as well as multimedia exhibits, movies and documentaries as close as your computer, I think the best role for a museum is to offer real, hands-on exhibits, such as Antietam battlefield or the LST # 1 or the Discovery Space Shuttle, where you can explore and get a feel for the real thing.

Panel 4 of the Jefferson Memorial may be looked at as classic enlightenment thought (belief in the progress of man) and/or the bane of those who always long for "the good ole days".

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Panel 3 also may be a reminder that timeless truths may be ephemeral. It contains the line:

Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

The next line in Jefferson's Autobiography, from which this comes, reads "Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."