9/11 Memorial Museum Gift Shop

So the 9/11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero will be opening on May 21st to the public. I looked at some pictures of it (The Memorial Museum) and I would gather it would be almost like stabbing yourself in the eye with a dull rusty spoon to go to it. Talk about rubbing copious amounts of salt into a wound that for many of us will never quite heal. I'd go if I ever went back to NYC. I'd go because sometimes you have to rub salt into the wound to remember that you're never to forget.

So before turning too maudlin on you all, I thought you might want to know that in the museum is a gift shop. WHAT??? WHAT???? Did I hear that correctly, a gift shop in a museum? UNHEARD of. And people are straight trippin' yo. On my FB feed and twitter feed alone I counted over 75 really pissed off mamajama's going OFF on this topic. They are seething.

Yes, there is a gift shop. Yes, in many ways I get why people are upset, I understand that crass commercialism on the graves of so many dead seems, well....crass. But they have to make money to keep it open. They have to pay people to clean it, sweep it, dust it. They have to pay to light it, air condition it. They need funds to pay for guides and narrators. So yes, a gift shop.

I mean really, who doesn't have some kind of "souvenir" from that day? I have all the copies of the newspapers that came out on 9/12. Every magazine that was issued that month with memorial stories. The same from the 1 year anniversary. So I guess I contributed to the crass commercialism. It's MY way of remembering.

So calm down people, save the outrage for something that matters, like the Memorial Executive's disgusting $700,000 a year salary.