The Museum of [In]tolerance

Prior to yesterday, I had never visited the Museum of Tolerance, though I had heard good things about it. Well, mostly. When Katy was in eighth grade, eir class took a trip to the museum and she encountered some trouble. While touring an exhibit on genocide during World War II, Katy's stomach began growling and making funny noises that caused eir peers to laugh. Irritated, the guide warned Katy to stop since the museum was not a laughing matter. Of course, a growling stomach is not easily controlled. With most other bodily functions like yawning, burping, and farting, you can at least make an honest attempt to stifle them, but that is not exactly the case with a growling tummy. Consequently, Katy's stomach persisted, as did the children's laughter, prompting the guide to chastise Katy in front of the whole group for being disruptive and disrespectful, then kicking eir out for eir indiscretions.

Fortunately, Katy had an caring history teacher who sat with eir, gave eir some food, then later forced the guide to make a public apology. Still, this didn't change the fact that Katy had missed most of the tour outside while sobbing in embarrassment. Nevertheless, it probably only qualifies as eir second worst field trip after the infamous butcher accident.

In spite of the Museum of Tolerance's display of intolerance, I was still interested in visiting. I'm not particularly wild about promoting "tolerance," however, as tolerance is essentially the least one could do. Consider things you tolerate: a nosy neighbor, a roommate's proclivity to leaving out dirty dishes, humidity in the summer, television advertisements. To say you tolerate something is hardly complimentary. It means that you put up with something, not appreciate or respect it.

A former coworker of mine once pointed out that "tolerance" is actually a reasonable goal. Given the hate speech my former students used, if I could get them to a state of merely tolerating people they claimed to revile, that would be a significant accomplishment.

In a time of crisis, I'm going to the Museum of Tolerance for protection. Airports are more lax in their security precautions. After searching our car's trunk and taking the metal detector quite seriously, Terri quipped, "Excuse the pun, but they're Nazis about security here."

As it turns out, the Museum of Tolerance misrepresents itself, or at least has a misleading name. It is almost exclusively a Holocaust history museum. I should have surmised this fact sooner though from the context clues. En route, I witnessed a disproportionate amount of Hasidic Jews, which is not exactly a common sight on most Los Angeles streets. While I'm in favor of tolerating Jewish people, I'm also in favor of tolerating other groups of people, too. Well, except for South Americans. And women.

Truthfully, I had trouble tolerating the Museum of Tolerance, as I found it boring. I'm pretty well versed on the Holocaust, so it was almost entirely redundant on a personal level. That said, I do believe it is a good resource, particularly for my former students, some of whom had never heard of it previously. Since it is important for people to understand and learn from human travesties, I respect its existence as an educator if not an individual.

Most of the exhibits included audio components that droned on for far too long. Furthermore, the doors that led from one room to another were stuck shut until the designated audio track came to completion. "I feel trapped," I whined to my companions before deciding they might be trying to replicate the feelings of being in a concentration camp.

One whole floor of the museum is devoted to "Family," which didn't make sense thematically initially, but upon further reflection, I suppose most of us could use a lesson in tolerating our family. In the exhibit, celebrities pay homage to their families, which was hardly moving, unless you count that it prompted us to move through the corridors in record time. The exhibit's celebrities include Billy Crystal, Carlos Santa, and Michelle Kwan. The museum employee referred to the last one as "Kristi Yamaguchi," however, demonstrating both an inconsiderate lumping of Asian-American figure skaters and a distinct lack of tolerance.

After sweeping through a photography exhibit, we followed the exit signs to a staircase. The staircase seemed unfinished, however, so I was a bit dubious about our approach, and felt even worse when another party of people followed us out, assuming we were doing the right thing. (Yes, another connection to the Holocaust.) The door at the bottom of the staircase then dumped us outside to a fenced in slab of concrete where some guys were playing a game of pick-up basketball. We made an attempt to reenter and retrace our steps, but we discovered ourselves locked out. A security guard assisted us out onto the street from a side entrance, apologizing and explaining that we weren't the first to assume that the emergency exit signs were just normal exit signs. (I'd blame the lack of the word "emergency" on the signage, but perhaps that's just me.) In other words, we were accidentally locked out of the Museum of Tolerance. Although we could have made an attempt to get back in through the normal entrance, dejected, we took this as a sign to leave for real. After all, as I learned from testimonies that day, the key to survival was escaping when it started looking bad and not waiting until it was too late.

That said, there was thing about the museum that made the whole trip worthwhile, though it wasn't even a part of the museum itself. On the residential streets surrounding the museum, every single house has multiple signs announcing: STOP The MUSEUM of TOLERANCE EXPANSION. The irony just about killed us. I could not stop laughing at the myriad of signs.

STOP THE SPREAD OF TOLERANCE!!!