Embrace youth and modern technology

THE EDITOR: Many today look at the 19th and 20th centuries with nostalgia.

We say to our children that we played and rode bicycles with no helmets and are here safely today. We played with real friends instead of watching TV, we visited our friends’ homes rather than texted them. Our families were nearby, and we enjoyed their company.

We prayed together, listened to our parents and respected each other. We invented a lot of new stuff and crowned our achievements by putting a man on the moon. We were pioneers discovering new lands and opening humanity to new wealth and prosperity.

What we fail to say is that in the last two centuries mankind justified the mass genocide of indigenous people in the Caribbean and the Americas, they fought each other in wars that were responsible for ending the lives of over 100 million people. Their toys left many of our children dismembered, paralysed and scarred. They waited for months to communicate with families overseas or far away. Many people died from simple diseases and infections.

They used religion to justify killing people who dared to challenge beliefs with science and enslaved humans and incinerated millions based on race and religion.

Their intelligence will be questioned by future generations who would wonder what could have led an entire global population to believe that men landed on the moon.

The youths of today’s world understand that the modern technologically advanced space shuttles could have only taken mankind, at best, 300 miles from the Earth before they were inundated with deadly radiation.

They will struggle to understand what could have led so many to believe that men were able to travel not 300 miles or a thousand miles or 100,000 miles from Earth but over 225,000 miles to the surface of the moon and back without adequate protection from radiation, modern communication devices or advanced computers.

If TT is to ever emerge from the downward trajectory of economic decline, our future must be in the hands of our youth. Our young engineers must build bridges to our western islands and possible to Tobago. Our young people must explore new ways of cultivating agricultural products as we take advantage of being able to produce exotic tropical fruits and vegetables.

Our visionary managers must be the ones to see the massive economic opportunities in marketing our steel pan, our unique mountains, streams, rivers, swamps and caves. Moreover, our youth will be the ones to lead us out of the world of sectarian and racial political loyalty to the building of a nation where all our people are respected and voted into office based on merit.

Our present leaders in government and opposition collectively have over 50 years in government.

They are very unlikely to embrace new ways of doing this. It’s time to give the youth a chance.

STEVE ALVAREZ via e-mail