Getting the short end of generational shift

AS USUAL, Manolo came up with an interesting gem in an entry that has generated 122 comments thus far. This snippet especially caught my attention:

The generation born in the 60s should have been coming into its own a decade ago; and the martial law baby generation coming into power now, but the leaders today are the leaders who should have been leading twenty years ago, which is another reason there’s such a wide gulf between the leadership and the public.

Now, rewind a century back to the time we were fighting for independence: when the likes of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini, Jacinto, and the Luna brothers roamed this land and carried the struggle for liberty in Madrid and Barcelona. Focus on their age, for instance. Thanks to this site, and to the revolutionary Google Spreadsheet (which easily handled birthdates in the 1800s, which Microsoft Excel miserably failed to do), I was able to generate the table below, using the Cry of Pugadlawin and the Declaration of Philippine Independence as the beginning and endpoints of that revolution.

I've read about how young these revolutionaries were somewhere; but I did not realize that they were this young when they tried to free the archipelago from the clutches of the Spanish colonial empire. Jacinto, for instance, was only 21 when the uprising began -- no different from the aspiring digital 3D animator from our subdivision who is currently matriculated at the Ateneo de Naga University!

Compare that to the aging dinosaurs we have today, and one can only weep. Turns out we're not only scraping the barrel when it comes to really good school heads, as I wrote about recently; we're also plumbing the depths when it comes to the national leadership, or the sheer lack of it.