Steve Jobs Was Not God, He was a Mere Mortal…But he was a Genius.
The media likes to make people believe that Anyone can go into their garage and invent a computer operating system and become a gazillionaire, they talk about how Jobs dropped out of college, well he was a genius and college wasn’t at his level of knowledge but heed this uneducated Teapublicans as you rail against education funding. Steve Jobs was a genius…You aren’t.
More After The Jump
Among Facebook friends yesterday, more than one wrote publicly that they were "crying" or "can't stop crying" or "teared up" due to Steve Jobs' death. Really now? You’re joking right?
You can't stop crying, now that you've heard that a middle-aged CEO has passed on, after a long battle with cancer? Seriously? If humans were always so empathetic, well, that would be understandable. But this type of one-upmanship of public displays of grief is both unbecoming and undeserved and most importsntly downright: PHONEY.
Real outpourings of public grief should be reserved for those people who lived life so heroically and selflessly that they stand as shining examples of love for all of humanity. People like, for example, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who—along with his family—was bombed, beaten, and stabbed during his years of principled activism in the US civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth died yesterday, the same day as Steve Jobs. He did not die a billionaire.
Death, of course, is not a competition. All deaths are sad for the living. Steve Jobs is no exception He was a husband, a father, a friend, and a lover. Everyone deserves to be mourned, and well-known people will inevitably be mourned more loudly than others. But it is actually important to keep our grief in perspective. When we start mourning technocrats as idols, we cheapen the lives of those who have sacrificed more for their fellow man.
Steve Jobs was great at what he did. There's no need to further fellate the man's memory. He made good computers, he made good phones, he made good music players. He sold them well. He got obscenely rich.
He enabled an entire generation of techie design fetishists to walk around with more attractive gadgets and counterfeits. However Steve Jobs did not meaningfully reduce poverty, or make life-saving scientific discoveries, or end wars or heal the sick or befriend the friendless. Which is fine—most of us don't. But most of us don't provoke such cult-like lachrymosity when we pass on. When even the journalists tasked with covering you and your company are reduced to pie-eyed fans apologizing for discomforting your insanely powerful multibillion-dollar corporation in some minor way, some perspective has been lost.
I've never owned an Apple product. Yet here I am, talking on phones, typing on computers, and reading the internet every day. If you like Apple products, then good for you, just remember are products. They do not have souls. They are not heroes, and neither is their creator, no matter how skilled he may have been. So mourn Steve Jobs —modestly, privately, and quietly. Those of you whose remembrances have already taken on a quasi-religious tone: seek psychiatric counseling.
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