A Trip to the Museum

In my Atlanta neighborhood there is a really terrific place called the Fernbank Natural History Museum. This is beautiful modern building in a park like setting pretty much in the middle of one of the more expensive areas in Atlanta. Perhaps I should have said that it is an adjacent neighborhood to mine, as I don’t live in one of the more expensive areas in Atlanta. In fact, I live in what is called a reclaimed urban district. No one who lives there actually calls it that, but that is what it is. First it was an upscale neighborhood, back before they used words like upscale, and then it became a rundown neighborhood and then a slum, people always used those words. Now it is being “reclaimed” and is turning out to be a good place to live. In mid-town we’re pretty much in the center of the city, close to all the cultural monuments, chichi restaurants and, of course, Piedmont Park. Even though, and I stress this, the average house price hovers in the five to six hundred thousand dollar area, it still is not as expensive as the part of town that is the home of the Fernbank Natural History Museum.

Returning to the point.

The Museum building is spectacular. Not so much on the outside, which just looks like a big modern building, but on the inside. You come into the lobby, which has a high two-story ceiling and box office. You buy your ticket, which always illustrates the difference between the way people view museums in Europe and the US. I’ve been to a lot of places in the UK and some in on the continent. I’ve never had to pay at the door. Yes, sometimes for special events that are on loan or installations that are not permanent there is a charge. But, it is never a big one, and to get through the door to see the permanent collection you never pay anything. Here the hand is out before even you get in the front door. In some of the major US museums the box-office is not even behind the museum walls but is housed outside, either in a kiosk or an opening in a wall that masks the real museum wall and it is always away from the front entrance. In Europe it people seem to think that if it is worth putting in a building it is worth supporting and should be available to all the people regardless of status. It is either part of the history of man or maybe the artistic visions of man, but it is valuable and should be shared. Here we figure that we can make a profit on it show it, if not, scrap it.

Again, I return to the point.

The Fernbank building has the most remarkable lobby that I have seen in a long while. It sores to a skylight at least four floors off the marble floor. A ground floor and then two levels of mezzanines swirl around the perimeter of the space. The skylight itself is worth the price of admission. Multiple plains of interlocking glass flood the area with natural light. In the middle of the ground floor of the lobby is a 123-foot long skeleton of a Dinosaur. Amazing! Well, the truth is that the bones are really plastic because this is a replica of the original discovered in South America and displayed there. But even with fake plastic bones, this sucker is huge. There are Dinosaur skeletons of all sizes and shapes, including airborne, spread around the Museum. Children surrounded almost all of them. I had always heard that it was little boys who were fascinated with Dinosaurs, but if my day at Fernbank is any indication, little girls seem to love them as much. This place not only had bones of all types and shapes, it had stuffed birds that looked so lifelike you though they might fly away. But, the best thing of all was the room that was set up for the kids to play in. All kinds of science stuff was there to be used. No signs saying stay away, but signs saying get to it and do it. Children were all over this place, laughing, discovering and best of all, having fun learning.

Once again I return to the point.

This building houses one honking big collection and it is all extraordinarily displayed. Not just the children, anyone could spend hours at this place. It traced the geological growth of Georgia and the South. It dealt with migration, using lighted maps that showed movement primitive man’s movement from Asia to here. There are exhibits showing man’s evolvement and evolution.

This is the point, though it is really a question.

What’s a Baptist to do? If teaching evolution is the devil’s work and this marvelous museum shows the evolutionary displays, without mentioning the word but a couple of times, do you keep your kids away? Afraid that if they go there they will be corrupted and turn their back on your religious dogma, even going so far as to secretly read Harry Potter when you aren’t looking. Perhaps you take them to the museum but put blinders on them as they past the questionable exhibits. Maybe this can be used as a teaching tool to show impressionable children that there are other views and opinions, but those are wrong. All in all, I suppose that a person can get out of a museum whatever they need to prove their worldview. As that applies to them I have to allow it to apply to me. Of course, I am the one who is correct.

Maybe the real point is; in millions of years from now, our time will occupy a place in some museum somewhere, perhaps on a different planet in a different galaxy. As the museum visitor passes our glassed in natural habitat, will they find us as funny as I do, or will we just seem sad?