You Can't Take a Helicopter to Heaven

It's been nearly a month since Apple founder Steve Jobs died at the age of 56 of pancreatic cancer. He is no longer on the cover of magazines. The piles of flowers and

the posters and letters heaped in front of Apple stores have been cleared away and replaced by a single nice clean Apple-endorsed image of a candle flickering within the Apple icon. The story is pretty much over.

Well, pretty much. Except for the bone pickings of loonies who have nothing better to do than to criticize the dead, and I don't mean historians. I mean the ones who smell a scrap of meat a mile away, like hyenas gathering around the edge of the clearing as dusk settles into

sunset. The predators. The ones who you might think were personally involved with Jobs for the personal way they are now attacking him. In our local newsweekly last week, a letter to an advice columnist castigated Steve Jobs for not "being there for his kids." "Pathetic," it calls him, for the bone-chilling sin of agreeing to have his biography written because he "wanted my kids to know me. I wasn't always there," Jobs confessed, "and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." The writer's point? "To me, other people deserve our love more than Steve Jobs does." Well, duh. As if anyone is talking about loving Steve Jobs. No. We are talking about admiring him.

We are living in an age of the helicopter parents, adults who act like their children's soccer games and dance lessons are more important than, well, nearly everything. I know. I'm one of those people parents call when their twenty-something student "just doesn't really seem to care that he got a C in Calculus and a B on the Economics midterm." Just today, I had a young man come in to talk because his mother wanted him to study leadership in his final semester of college since she wasn't sure he had the ability to go out into the world and grab it by the testicles. We talked for a while, and I sent him off with some links to groups that led workshops on leadership skills and, I confess, the suggestion that he might do better to do something that let him exercise leadership instead of sitting in another classroom. I resisted the salient urge to suggest he learn what leadership really is by telling his mom he was a man now.

Only people utterly insecure in their own planetary worth would criticize the newly dead for their own personal shortcomings. The action of those who try to rob Steve Jobs of admiration and

respect reminds me of those deplorable creatures who haunt cemetaries with signs of vitriol hate and violence at the interment of soldiers brave enough to die in the course of duty while not asking, not telling. Again, the hyenas around the periphery, waiting for the defenseless.

How despicable to be so cowardly that the only people you dare to criticize are dead. How revolting to be a dung beetle when you have the skies open above you because you had the great good fortune to find yourself a human being alive in the United States of America.

Make the most of your own life. Don't try to inflate yourself by deflating others. Do something positive. And leave Steve Jobs alone. He died an untimely death extremely well.