Never go to “Planet Word” in Washington DC

In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it.

This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today.

Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip, alas, has been hell—a constant struggle against logistical failures. The first days were mostly spent sitting in traffic or searching for phantom parking spaces that didn’t exist. (So then we switched to the Metro, and promptly got lost, and had our metro cards rejected by the machines.) Or, at crowded cafes, I spent the time searching for a table so my starving kids could eat—and then when I finally found a table, a woman, smug and sure-faced, evicted us from the table because she was “going to” sit there, and my kids had to see that their dad could not provide for their basic needs, and that woman will never face any consequence for what she did.

Anyway, this afternoon, utterly frazzled and stressed and defeated, we entered “Planet Word,” a museum about language. Sounds pretty good, right? Except my soon-to-be 7-year-old son got bored by numerous exhibits that weren’t for him. So I told him he could lead the way and find any exhibit he liked.

Finally my son found an exhibit that fascinated him, one where he could weigh plastic fruits on a balancing scale. He was engrossed by it, he was learning, he was asking questions, I reflected that maybe the trip wasn’t a total loss … and that’s when a museum employee pointed at us, and screamed at us to leave the room, because “this exhibit was sold out.”

The room was actually almost empty (!). No one had stopped us from entering the room. No one else was waiting to use the balancing scale. There was no sign to warn us we were doing anything wrong. I would’ve paid them hundreds of dollars in that moment if only we could stay. My son didn’t understand why he was suddenly treated as a delinquent. He then wanted to leave the whole museum, and so did I. The day was ruined for us.

Mustering my courage to do something uncharacteristic for me, I complained at the front desk. They sneered and snickered at me, basically told me to go to hell. Looking deeply into their dumb, blank expressions, I realized that I had as much chance of any comprehension or sympathy as I’d have from a warthog. It’s true that, on the scale of all the injustices in the history of the world, this one surely didn’t crack the top quadrillion. But for me, in that moment, it came to stand for all the others. Which has always been my main weakness as a person, that injustice affects me in that way.

Speaking of which, there was one part of DC trip that went exactly like it was supposed to. That was our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Why? Because I feel like that museum, unlike all the rest, tells me the truth about the nature of the world that I was born into—and seeing the truth is perversely comforting. I was born into a world that right now, every day, is filled with protesters screaming for my death, for my family’s death—and this is accepted as normal, and those protesters sleep soundly at night, congratulating themselves for their progressivism and enlightenment. And thinking about those protesters, and their predecessors 80 years ago who perpetrated the Holocaust or who stood by and let it happen, is the only thing that really puts blankfaced museum employees into perspective for me. Like, of course a world with the former is also going to have the latter—and I should count myself immeasurably lucky if the latter is all I have to deal with, if the empty-skulled and the soul-dead can only ruin my vacation and lack the power to murder my family.

And to anyone who reached the end of this post and who feels like it was an unwelcome imposition on their time: I’m sorry. But the truth is, posts like this are why I started this blog and why I continue it. If I’ve ever imparted any interesting information or ideas, that’s a byproduct that I’m thrilled about. But I’m cursed to be someone who wakes up every morning, walks around every day, and goes to sleep every night crushed by the weight of the world’s injustice, and outside of technical subjects, the only thing that’s ever motivated me to write is that words are the only justice available to me.