These experiences undoubtedly bring back memories of your childhood visits to Civil War battle sites in Tennessee. I think that it's easier to understand and absorb those stories when they're told with reference to a particular place or structure that itself is a symbol of the long tradition out of which the stories that we're told as children come. This is a clarion call for reintegrating ourselves with the environment, with each other, and with our cultural identities. I think that we're vulnerable to some modern forms of entertainment and mass marketing that almost hypnotize people. I don't mean the word literally, but if you watch some children sitting in front of a television set with the images blinking at them, you'll notice that they will stay there for hours upon hours upon hours.
Many children spend more time in front of the television than in the classroom.
The constant bombardment, I think, does have an effect on some people that is akin to pushing them further away from more interactive experiences that cause deeper contemplation and reflection about how we fit into the communities we live in and into the cultural traditions that we're part of. People who turn the television off and go to a museum with their family and friends have a fundamentally different experience. They interact with one another and with the exhibits that are designed to provoke thought. And with the exciting new developments in the art of presentation, museums seem to be finding some really neat ways to pull people into the stories they're trying to tell with their exhibits. As families go out and experience museums, I think they're drawn back to them.