World War Two Museum Visit

I visited the World War II museum this past Saturday, December 12. What seemed as a fun trip to the museum turned into an unexpected journey. In line to buy my tickets, I ran into my new soccer coach, Mrs. Tilling's father-in-law. After saying hello, and parting, my mom and I walked through the exhibits looking at the artifacts enclosed in the glass cases and reading the captions while watching the videos projected onto the white oval shape, tilted object on the floors. We wound our way up the staircases from the European front to the Pacific front gawking at how different life was then to now. My mom and I talked about, just as we did in class, how easily it is to forget that there is actually a war in Iraq and Afghanistan if you do not know any one fighting there. My mom even pretended that I was an exhibit when she made me talk about World War II to a group of older ladies who said that I was "an adorable little thing". After explaining to this group that the decision to drop the atomic bomb wasn't just to end the war (thanks ATF, you saved me), the women walked away with a better understanding. (Which I thought was odd, considering they looked old enough to have survived WWI- not saying this in a derogatory way, just stating a fact.) After walking up and then down the staircases, my mom and I decided to end our tour with the movie. Although most people started with the movie and then looked at the exhibit, we got there right as a movie was starting and decided that our time would be better spent actually doing something instead of sitting and drinking coffee. My mom dropped out of the movie as we stood in line because she decided that it would bother her eyes to watch a 4-D movie. So, as my luck would have it, I ran into my soccer coach again. He invited me to join his wife and their friends in line and said that I should sit with them throughout the movie. While standing for about 15 minutes in line, the other 7 adults and I had a conversation about WWII and how the D-day Museum did an amazing job and depicting how the war actually was instead of trying to cover it up with encouraging propaganda that hid the reality of the war. The adults were surprised that I could keep up with them and their discussions on the policies of Wilson and Teddy that led to World War II and they also were surprised to know about how the atomic bomb decision was reached. To make a long story short, we watched the movie and said good bye shortly after.

On the ride home, I came to realize one thing. World War Two was not just a 4 year war that was fought on two different sides of the world and just won by the US because we're beast like that. World War Two was a tough war that caused the US to band together, men and women, to feel around in the dark without the protection or guidelines of Washington's Farewell Address to lead them. I don't think that dropping the atomic bomb caused the US to let go of WFA (Washington's Farewell Address), I think that entering the war caused them to. Nowhere in WFA does it state what to do with an atomic bomb or how to inform the vice president after the president who kept the project in secret dies. World War Two was a test that made the US realize that women were just as good at warfare as men were and that the US was very lucky to win the war because if you compare the number of troops in Japan and Germany to the amount in the US, the opposing sides should have crushed America, but this was not the outcome. The WWII museum not only showed me how intense the war was, but it took the terms and definitions that were memorized out of the book and put them into pictures and 3-D models and even a 4D movie. Now, I just wish that everything we cover in history could have such an amazing museum to match.