Annual Washington Tour Provides Valuable Cultural Experience

 

For the past 40 years, over 40,000 rising high school seniors across America have had the opportunity to participate in the annual Electric Cooperative Youth Tour of Washington, D.C. Students compete for the opportunity by writing a creative piece that incorporates the history or future of cooperative power in their short stories.

This year I was fortunate enough to be selected as the teacher to accompany four students and two electric cooperative employees representing my county. I had never visited our nation’s capital before, so I was excited from the time I found out in the fall of 2010 that I would be going.

On Friday, June 6 at 6:30 in the morning, a bus full of eager but sleepy students, cooperative employees, and teachers departed Nashville, headed for Staunton, Virginia. The first two days would be the longest part of the trip. The coordinators of the trip, spearheaded by our fearless leader Joe Jackson, Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association Director of Youth and Member Relations, had arranged for some introductory activities along the way so that participants from across Tennessee could get to know each other better.

Saturday morning, we visited Monticello, home to our third president, considered at the time as “America’s greatest thinker.” Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite presidents, particularly because of his cerebral qualities—as noted, his ideas concerning separation of church and state, and his overall complexity. He was a walking paradox, a man who wrote in the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” yet one who held slaves, even sired children by them, and struggled with the slavery question. Jefferson’s home, an Italian Renaissance beauty with its octagonal dome, is just as complex and interesting as the innovative maverick that designed it and lived there.

Saturday afternoon our group arrived in Alexandria, Virginia. After briefly settling into the hotel, we headed to the Capitol for a group photo and then on to some of the nation’s memorials, including the Presidential memorials for Jefferson and Lincoln, and the war memorials for Vietnam and Korea.

We soon learned that every day was packed to the hilt with activities, which was fortunate because a person could spend a month in Washington, D.C., exploring the city’s treasures and still not see everything there is to see.

The myriad highlights included a visit to Arlington Cemetery, where we saw the somber changing of the guard and two wreath-layings accompanied by a poignant pomp and circumstance; a comedic murder mystery at the Kennedy Center; a triple-decker boat cruise on the Potomac; a visit to the sobering Holocaust Museum; the Smithsonian—or the Smithsonians, I should say, as there are several separate museums in the group; and, near the end of the trip, President George Washington’s former home, Mt. Vernon.

Our last day in D.C., we visited the Capitol, where we met with our representatives and senators. It was exciting to stand on the Capitol steps and have our photographs taken with our nation’s lawmakers. I also had the opportunity to visit the office of my Congressman, Steve Cohen, who represents Tennessee’s ninth district in the U.S. House of Representatives and chat with him briefly.

Overall, the week was much more than I expected it to be. Even though I was exhausted from constant activity and lack of sleep, I was, like many of the students, not ready to return home. I had made new friends, and I felt as if I had tasted only a smattering of what D.C. had to offer.

Looking back, I cannot stress how important an educational opportunity this trip is to young people in our state and nation. If one pays attention, there is a chance to learn almost as much in one week as might be learned in an entire semester from a textbook in the classroom environment.

And, of course, the emotional impact of experiencing our nation’s history firsthand is something that cannot be obtained any other way. This year, this 4^th of July, as we celebrate the 235^th anniversary of our nation’s birth, I have a new perspective and new knowledge. It is an experience that I wish every American citizen could have at least one time in his or her life.