On Wednesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs died. When I learned of his death, I immediately burst into tears. For him and his family, of course but also for me: he has done so much to make our lives better. I am not a person who ever understood computers. I am horrible with them and am even a bit technophobic because they are so beyond me, but Steve Jobs made technology accessible to me. I have grown up using Apple products. I have written this piece on my lovely Apple MacBook Pro. I use my ipad and my iphone every day. My daughter Lucy is not even two years old yet and is addicted to my ipad and my iphone and her own ipod Touch. These products save me and other diners in restaurants in LA as my daughter stays quiet and sedate as she uses these things to entertain herself: she was the best baby at Rosh Hashanah services because of my iphone. I was crying not just for what he did but for what he wont be doing in the future. Apple supposedly has three years of products from the Jobs era in the pipeline but after that: what will become of Apple or of any of us? We have seen what Apple was like without Jobs: it was horrible. Those were dark years. What will it be like after these three years? What new innovations are we all going to miss out on? What new advancements in technology?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple from the ground up at in Silicon Valley, soldering circuit boards themselves until they turned what their “Little Kingdom” into a huge empire which has revolutionized computers, software and media. They are a great American success story: they literally created something wonderful out of nothing.
In the midst of my mourning I realized something very important: Steve Jobs is a billionaire and a CEO. According to Barack Obama and the protesters on Wall Street, he’s the villain. Apple is the most valuable company of the world with a market capitalization of over $353 billion as of this morning. They have more cash on hand than the US government. According to every value of the current Democrat Party, we’re supposed to hate people like Steve Jobs, not mourn him. I’m a middle class person. According to them, Jobs has stolen from me. He has taken advantage of me and everyone else in my economic strata and below by constantly making something new so I had to buy something new, by constantly selling us his upgrades which made his other products obsolete and constantly making such cool new products that you can’t help but greedily covet and then buy and buy and buy! which constantly separates me and every other innocent middle class consumer from our hard-earned money. He is the ultimate villain they have been fighting against. According to the Wall Street Protesters, we should be glad Jobs is dead.
Instead, I hear that some of them are holding candlelight vigils at Apple Stores. If they acknowledge the sadness of his death, don’t they have to acknowledge that he is the very vermin that they have been fighting against? He is the greatest example of modern capitalism personified in a human being? Or will the rich kids protesting on Wall Street, keeping in touch with their iphones, keeping themselves amused with their ipads acknowledge the fact that his death is a great loss to us all and that maybe CEO’s and billionaires have changed all of our lives for the good? Maybe the wall street urchi should accept the fact that there are CEO’s and billionaires who deserve their position and their money and if there are some, maybe many, if not most, of them do. And if most of them do, maybe capitalism isn’t that bad after all?
I am crying again: the world has lost a great innovator and a great humanitarian. Because maybe being a great humanitarian isn’t just singing songs to African AIDS victims and donating money to the poor by buying Gap “Red Label” clothes (barf.) Maybe being a great humanitarian can also mean changing the lives of the normal person for the better. Jobs did that for me: in huge ways he has changed my life for the better. So, Steve Jobs, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will miss you terribly and to you creeps “occupying” places in your unshowered state…PISS OFF AND GET A JOB!
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This is the second epilog on Steve Jobs, a magnificent liberal, a superb capitalist, a marvelous American, which has quite accurately, encapsulated his material achievements….missing almost entirely, totally, with the exception of one prior small, notable, comment, the man’s spirituality. This major omission is a cameo of why America may be in trouble, confused, temporarily lost and, according to some, those in the streets today, on the decline.
Steve Jobs was the innovator, the husband, the father, the mastermind behind Apple, NeXT, Pixar and many other ideas, but what’s less talked about is his very private but inseparable from the man, theological drive and spirituality.
Many reports suggest that Jobs worked for the video game manufacturer Atari as a technician with the main purpose of raising enough money for about a year-long spiritual and dharma retreat to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment. This was his reported trip to India including visiting the Ashram of Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba.
Steve Jobs came back to America with a shaved head and wearing traditional Indian robes and apparently anchored in a higher belief system. He regularly walked around his office/neighborhood barefoot which is very common in Buddhist and Hindu faiths.
Hinduism was a definite source of spirituality and inspiration for Steve Jobs as he liked yoga and was also vegetarian, known for his strong love and compassion to all animals and was even known to explore Hinduism during his trip to India in 1970s.
Jobs then traveled to India to visit the Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.
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How soon we forget that we were, and for the most part still are, a Judeo-Christian country, bedrock for the “freedom of religion”, with tolerance and understanding of atheism.
The goodness and greatness of this man surely came, for the most part, from the blessing of his creator, or the source of his existence, and from his spirituality, an identifiable life pivot, a direct contradiction to the secular progressive drift of our country today. Please, do not diminish the very essence of this individual by denying or ignoring his mysticism! This is an inseparable pillar of the legacy of our Founding Fathers, the miracle of American exceptionalism.