A Time for Irony

A word about today's gathering on the National Mall, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear." It's clever and it's funny and lots of people I know are going, but I don't want my daughter to be one of them.

She's young enough that I'd like her first experience of such an event to be an actual and not an ironic one. It would take much more than a single blog post to describe how I feel about kids and irony. In short, I think it's an attitude toward life best developed slowly and with experience. Best to at least start off life with some sense of purpose. There will be plenty of time later to become jaded.

I was heartened to read an op-ed in the Washington Post last week on this topic. In "A Like-In for Generation I," Alexandra Petri, a self- described member of the Millenial generation, says, "To Generation I [that's "I for irony, iPhones and the Internet," she writes], for whom life exists so we can put as many things as possible in quotes, this 'rally' is the closest we will ever get to a love-in. It's a 'like-in.'"

At the risk of sounding earnest and old-fashioned and absolutely square — give me a love-in every time.