Last night I went with my new sweetie to the Lincoln Memorial. It was dark and the lights inside the monument were warm and inviting. It's probably been 15 years since I've seen the monuments at night and it was so incredible. Brian and I just stood in awe in front of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's second inaugural speech, tears running down both our cheeks. The schoolchildren from Missouri all thought we were dorks.

Poor things, they're too young to understand what it's like to be a citizen - to fight to be a part of something and love and hate it all at the same time, to know both the amazing traits of what you belong to and the dirty underbelly simultaneously. It will be years before they calculate what they owe in taxes, wonder where the money is going, get into an arguement about the justice of war, or contemplate if another country could hold a better life for them. It'll also be years before they stand again on the steps of that monument and look out across the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument and Capital and marvel at how wonderful our nation truly is. Or be able to conjugate the scope of the war memorials, to realize just how many people joined together and gave their lives for a cause.

That is, if they do at all. Who knows, they could be content to obey, shop at Wal-Mart, eat Doritos and save up for a plasma screen TV. The thought is depressing and the reasons for the staunch differences between generations in this country are too numerous to begin to discuss here. But I pray every day, to whom I don't pretend to know, that even a small percentage will break out of the mold.

So the pre-teens pranced around the monument, posing for pictures in Charlie's Angels trios and giggling as Brian and I moved through the crowd like statues ourselves, staring up at the walls and squeezing each others hands as we read. At 24, we were old fogies, just reaching the end of line in terms of coolness. Someday I just hope they realize that being an American, a thinking, tax-paying, free-voting grown-up American, liberal or conservative, is way cooler than being an Abercrombie Zombie.