Category: age

The Warning Light Of A Generation

May 29, 2010 by Taran Rampersad

My perspective shifted when I realized I was a year older than the appointed Attorney General. There's a line from John Mayer's 'Waiting On The World To Change'  that sprang to mind:

...One day our generation Is gonna rule the population ...

Reality sets in. It's only the Attorney General. The majority of them are still the generation or two before me, including the Prime Minister herself. The Attorney General is the warning light, though. It means people of my generation are going to be governing Trinidad and Tobago - even Barack Obama is 10 years older than me. But it has started. Soon, very soon, it's going to be people of my generation.

Like the generation before me who went to school with Patrick Manning and his sisters and who remember the one who died, a sad story. The generation that used to drink with Bas. My father's generation knew these people in a way that was intimate. But people of my generation and younger never shared that intimacy. To many of us, these faces became like the characters on Sesame Street¹: sometimes as amusing, sometimes seemingly close but in reality always very distant. They don't look at our generations as equals, they view us as children. And maybe, at least for some, the reverse is true. How we view that generation before might vary from person to person but no one can deny that it is different than viewing a peer.

These people influenced how we saw their generation.

Soon enough, there will be more peers there. And how our generation behaves will determine how the next generations will view us.

And the reason I write this: {Read more}