BONUS ART TOUR
I went and visited the WWI and although its cliché to say this it was eye opening. I didn’t have a “woke” experience it just put the histories that I learned all my academic life into perspective. I went on the mandatory field trip when I was a sophomore in high school and while it was interesting then I was too busy laughing with my friends to understand the weight of it all. When you enter there is a glass bridge that takes you into the main exhibits and whatnot. Underneath that glass bridge were 9000 fake poppy flowers. Each flower represented a thousand lives lost in the war. The poppy became a symbol of the first world war after a poet wrote about the fields of “crimson” poppies in bloom. They reminded him of a field of blood spilt in the war. The concept was sobering.
Next, I walked along the painted wall of the soldier who suffered from being gassed in their trenches and that led to the exhibit of a replica of what the trenches would look like. They were so narrow and looked like certain death. The entire thing reminded me of the movie War Horse. The scenes with the trenches made it seem as though there was a lot of space for people traffic but if you can imagine those trenches full of people there probably wasn’t even room for farting privately. The posted information card thing told about how people died, got sick, even found God in the trenches. It was horribly unsanitary and in-between trenches was no man’s land: a place to be shot to hell if crossed.
While we are on the topic of being shot to hell, I also visited the room of artillery. 
The guns were super dated but one card read that a shot from a long-barreled gun (I forgot the name) could shatter bone. Walking underneath the fighter jets was fun as well. The room also contained the uniform they would wear into combat. There was no protection whatsoever besides the helmet that the soldiers wore. The boots looked like they could go about 30 miles before starting to come apart. I learned off the card that they often, when low on resources, had to take clothes from the dead (like their shoes and whathaveyou) to keep keeping on. The dead weren’t in any position to need them anyway. I ended in the room with all the technology of the day so the old fords and farming trucks and military casual clothes were in that room. Something I had to chuckle at though was a tan uniform with a sash loaded up with patches. It looked like something the final Boy Scout boss that you must fight would be wearing.
The guns were super dated but one card read that a shot from a long-barreled gun (I forgot the name) could shatter bone. Walking underneath the fighter jets was fun as well. The room also contained the uniform they would wear into combat. There was no protection whatsoever besides the helmet that the soldiers wore. The boots looked like they could go about 30 miles before starting to come apart. I learned off the card that they often, when low on resources, had to take clothes from the dead (like their shoes and whathaveyou) to keep keeping on. The dead weren’t in any position to need them anyway. I ended in the room with all the technology of the day so the old fords and farming trucks and military casual clothes were in that room. Something I had to chuckle at though was a tan uniform with a sash loaded up with patches. It looked like something the final Boy Scout boss that you must fight would be wearing.
All in all, the second visit to the WW1 museum was something that put the horrors of wars past into perspective. The advancements in technology have not only affected war weapons but how war is fought. Wars used to be so unorthodox, the weapons primitive to what we have now. If you think about it, despite the number of people who died a war like that today in the same fashion with the machinery we have now? many more lives would have been lost and the poppy flowers in the entryway floors would need to be multiplied in numbers.
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