The death of Steve Jobs got me thinking–contributing blogger Devon Miller-Duggan is looking for optimism

The death of Steve Jobs got me thinking. Actually, a comment by one of my students about the death and how silly all the public grief was (especially the folks outside the stores holding up their ipads with animated burning candles on the screens). I said I didn’t think it was all that silly. 

Jobs was the last person I could absolutely identify with the sense of what it meant to be an American that I grew up with–the identity reflected in JFK’s inaugural speech–the notion that we were more than competent. We were uber-competent. We could decide to go to the moon and do it. Of course my  sense of our invulnerablilty and our boundless capacity and our commitment to doing good and doing right didn’t last very much beyond that inauguration. Even though I was pretty young, I knew something major was going on in October 1962: We lived in El Paso then and the SAC planes took off at 3-minute intervals for days. No planes of any sort were left on the ground for longer than it took to refuel them. And for some reason, I remember the NATO troops you saw when you went to the PX were particularly stiff and nervous-looking. And, of course, there were the notorious duck-and-cover drills, which even in 4th grade seemed silly to me.

Still, even in the midst of all the upheavals and revisions of the 60s and 70s (we had the National Guard in Wilmington for 5 years after the MLK assassination, so the Small Wonder got its full measure of the chaos), I remember thinking that people’s minds could be moved toward better, stronger, deeper truths–that they could be opened, and that light could shine. 

It’s been a while since I felt that. I had a nice visit from Optimism and Passion back in 2008. then they went away again. 

But several evenings ago the doorbell rang and it was a former student to whom I hadn’t spoken in a couple of years–since she graduated. She’s been working as an organizer of community gardens in Philadelphia–doing the sort of pro-green, pro-community, pro-change work that she’d always planned to do. But there she was on my doorstep with her boyfriend at 9 on a Monday night, out of the blue, freshly and glowingly full of excitement and enthusiasm for their time at Occupy Philly (you can see Robyn giving a press release at 12guageangel on youtube). They’d taken off on a post-gardening-season roadtrip to see old friends with nothing more than their amazingly light backpacks and some vague plans. That’s a sort of adventurousness I never had and am grateful neither of my daughters had, but I admire the heck out of it in others. 

They were brimful of excitement about the Occupy movement. They believe it is genuinely transformative and that it marks a true hinge-point in the country’s history. They Believe. God, I hope they’re right–both about the transformation and about how positive it will be. And I hope they travel safely and remain full of hope and spit and vinegar even longer than we did.