epitaphs

On my last trip, I spent time catching up on magazine reading – a typical practice for long flights, and my recent flights were exceptionally long. It was within about a week of Steve Jobs’ passing, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that most publications had not just one, but multiple articles on the founder of Apple. I read the first few, but after that, I started to feel a bit, well, annoyed... but mostly sad.

See, the week before Jobs died, one of my personal heroes had passed away with little to no fanfare on the international stage. Wangari Maathai was an outspoken advocate for women and the environment, one of the first African women to earn a PhD, and a Nobel Prize winner. She was the first woman elected to the Kenyan Parliament, and through the Greenbelt Movement, which she founded, oversaw the planting of 30 million trees (that’s not a typo!) She persevered from rural, impoverished conditions to gain both her education and voice. Along the way she was beaten, imprisoned, marginalized, yet never failed to speak truth to power. She was a pioneer in every sense of the word and a catalyst of change in her nation and beyond.

Yet, whose face was on cover after cover of every magazine I picked up? The creative genius, design guru, multimillionaire Mr. Jobs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod as much as anyone and would be significantly less informed without the hours of podcasts kindly supplied by iTunes. (It was even in a podcast that I first heard Wangari Maathai interviewed.)  Yet, as I continued to see more and more articles eulogizing Jobs, I couldn’t help but notice that they all celebrated the brilliant innovation of Apple’s products and Jobs’ foresight into the world of technology, but none, not a single one, celebrated his humanity. There was no mention of his compassion, his philanthropy, his kindness or generosity.

Sure, maybe I read the wrong articles and he was actually a big-hearted guy. But from what I sensed, his notoriety and the incessant memorializing centered on the Things He Sold Us. Eventually, this just started to make me sad, because (brace yourself)…  what does the fact that our society idolizes him (in a way that almost borders on worship) say about us? Are these the people whose lives we celebrate? Is this as good as our heroes get – a corporate executive who was (according to some accounts) a big jerk?

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for artistry and vision and technological advances, and Mr. Jobs made awesome products and cute movies at Pixar, too. But did he truly change lives, did he make the world a better place… for everyone, including the billions who will never ever own an iPod?  Maybe I just don’t get it (that’s totally possible), or maybe I just look for different qualities in my Heroes. 

And then there she was, on the next to last page of a magazine with Jobs on the cover (again) – Wangari Maathai, her rich, complex, inspirational life shrunk into a few paragraphs… but I am thankful that at least it was there at all.