these go to 11.

When I was a kid we didn’t have enough money to go on vacations via aeroplane (we also were too poor to understand that it’s not called “aeroplane” anymore) and so we drove everywhere and stayed in campgrounds and Learned Things.

Despite the fact that we were un-rich, my parents were pretty devoted to the idea of my brother, sister, and I growing up with a grasp on basic American history and a healthy, guilty understanding that people who looked a lot like us had spent the better part of the last 400 or so years acting like complete shitheels to people of other races.  They also wanted us to know that some people were much less well-off than we were, even though we were all wearing clothes that ranged in quality from garage sale to Kohl’s.  So every time we’d go on vacation they’d go out of their way to take us on The Poverty Tour.  We saw rural poverty.  Urban poverty.  The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota— TWICE.  A part of New Orleans that I remember as being partially on fire.  Baltimore’s non-tourism district.  The Mississippi Delta.  West Virginia, via non-major highways.  Nougalases Arizona and Mexico. 

The other part of our vacations usually involved going to museums or historical sites.  The Gettysburg battlefield.  The National Holocaust Museum.  The Little Bighorn site.  And the site of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. The only reason we didn’t go to where JFK was shot was that I think my parents are against Texas, as a concept.

As a child, what I could take from all of that was this:  everyone’s mad at me, and will continue to be mad at me, and the best way to respond to that is to just let them be mad and feel really awful, because really terrible things happened and I didn’t do anything about it.  

As an adult:  still processing.