Every day I wake up I consider myself incredibly lucky to be currently living in the capital of our nation. History fanatics such as myself know that Washington D.C. is a focal point for American history. And while I’m here, I’m trying to take every spare moment to absorb the historical depth of my surroundings. As a student enrolled in a once semester study program, I am in the unique position of being both a resident and a tourist in this amazing city. I know the bus system and the best grocery stores like the back of my hand, but I also have to be mindful to use every moment that I can to see the history and attractions that D.C. has to offer before I am drawn back to my everyday life on the west coast.

In light of this, I try and dedicate every weekend to seeing a new museum, exploring a new neighborhood or visiting a historical site. To date, some of the most awe-inspiring and sobering places I have been include Arlington National Cemetery, One World Trade Center (New York) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At each of these places, I never felt anything less than complete reverence and heartache for the people they eternally seek to memorialize.

Unfortunately, I went about weekend adventures with a naive trust in the nature of people to be respectful and educated to certain issues involving the sites. I was first confronted with this type of callousness during this year’s presidential inauguration. I attributed the inappropriate taunting and jeering to the high strain the recent political season had on parties and voters in general. However, the longer I live here in D.C. and the more I see similar instances happening, the more I realize that there are deep rooted issues in American society that have caused people to be desensitized to the importance of human sacrifice and unsympathetic to the plight of human suffering.

In the moments that I stood before the eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery, and I tried to comprehend the sorrow and fear that people must have felt at having the president of the United States murdered before their eyes, a group of unsupervised children standing next to me on the memorial began laughing with joy as they played tag across the plaza. As I continued touring the cemetery, my senses were on alert to the actions of the people around me. Parents eagerly lined their kids up and requested that they smile in front of the rows and rows of tombstones.

During a visit to New York, my friends and I made it top priority to visit the Memorial of the World Trade Center. I was very young during the terrorist attacks on American soil, however, I was raised with the awareness of the tragedy of this attack, and it is still a large part of my history as an American. I wanted to stand there in the shadow of the other buildings surrounding ground zero, and be able to fully appreciate the horror that was 9/11 in a way that I was unable to comprehend at the time that it occurred.

I went there to gain a better understanding of my history, unfortunately, at some point members of our society stopped seeing Ground Zero as a memorial and they started seeing it as a tourist attraction. I stood there and watched teenagers anxiously try and choose a filter as they captured the moment in a Snapchat selfie. People with selfie sticks complained in every language and dialect as they failed to capture the massive fountain in the background of their group photo. Actions like these made it apparent to me that seeing the memorial was just another check on a list of tourist attractions that people wanted to see as they were visiting the city, and it held little significance to them otherwise.

This last week, I went through the process of emotionally preparing myself for a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We are well into the month of March, and as I was warned, the city has started to flock with tourists. I was prepared to for the heart-wrenching feeling I would get upon seeing the exhibits, and I was prepared for the hoards of people who would probably only add to my discomfort in the museum. What I was not prepared for was the alarming amount of children in the museum.

The halls were packed with bored and reluctant children being herded through the exhibits by their parents. While their parents showed some genuine interest, it couldn’t be more apparent that their elementary aged children did not. Children leaned against the glass cases containing artifacts and signs, and they complained about being hungry, tired, hot or anything else that could make it obvious to others that they were not enjoying themselves. Smaller children would look at the grotesque pictures of starving men and women and ask loud inappropriate questions because they literally did not know what they were looking at or in what context the picture was taken. Not only were such young children not taking advantage of being in the museum, but also they were making it difficult for other patrons to appreciate the experience.

Seventh and eighth graders touring with their school from across the country occupied every vacant bench along the halls as they huddled together to stare at their phones. They walked through the halls without even looking at the exhibits, and when they did stop to look, they would make remarks that proved that they had little to no previous education on the holocaust.

It is apparent to me that we as a society have become deeply desensitized to the worst humanity has to offer. Our society only wants the photo locations that will get us the most likes on our selfies and the most followers on our Instagrams. Parents want to brag to their friends that they used their time wisely and took their kids on an educational vacation. Or they footed the bill to have their eighth grader sent across the country to Washington D.C. only look at his phone the entire time.

The values of our society have shifted. We no longer care about history or sacrifice. We only care about our own comfort and popularity. We want to make ourselves look good and feel good even if it means blocking out the events in history that detrimentally wounded entire groups of people including our ancestors. It hurts me that so many young children I came in contact with at these three sites were uneducated to historical facts that made these places significant. It upsets me that parents are willing to take their five-year-olds to a holocaust museum without even explaining to them beforehand what they would be seeing.

Now more than ever we need to be educating ourselves to the suffering of our fellow human beings both in the past and the present. We need to be aware of the conditions that brought pain, torture, cruelty and death, and we need to be appreciative to the heroes who gave their lives in situations to that others might live. We need to know their stories more than we need to know the “stories” of our friends on Instagram or Snapchat. Finally, this education needs to be done in the correct time and place. Maybe parents should chill out for a second and take their eight-year-old to Disneyland and not to a national cemetery or holocaust museum.