This week marks the death of a leader and perhaps the end of an era of our nation’s greatest revolutions over the past few decades. America’s technological revolution, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to the present day, brought about the age of cellular technology, digital computation and multimedia communications to the consuming masses.
Steve Jobs’ role as an incubator and shaper of that revolution created a movement of creative genius in marketing, performance and leadership, the likes of which are idolized by his prospective successors.
Evidence of Jobs’ legacy permeated throughout the technology realm that he helped create. To those for whom Apple was their primary passion and fantastic fixation, Steve Jobs was everything: technical genius, artistic visionary and entrepreneurial capitalist all. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to anoint him posthumously as a “secular prophet” of American culture, entertainment and industry.
The death of a leader can often be traumatic for an individual, company or nation, depending on the weight and clout of the leader in question. Oftentimes a fundamental reassessment of the internal workings of the leader’s followers occurs, whereby they are left asking what shall follow in the wake of their champion’s ashes. Civilization’s great movements and convulsions have all been marked by the ascendancy of great and triumphant individuals capable of bending the arc of history toward justice and truth.
Great Britain never would have survived the German Blitz through blood, sweat and tears had the English not lent their ears to the fiery, steadfast and nobly resolute Winston Churchill during WWII. America’s Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s would never have achieved the historic political legislation and social progress that it did without the stirring oratory of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
South Africa’s release from the yoke of apartheid at the turn of the millennium would not have been complete were it not for the endurance and struggle of Nelson Mandela’s trial in prison.
To the participants, marchers and agitators of those movements, all were heroes shining light where darkness once dwelled. However, every hero needs a champion. And so it is that every movement needs a leader.
We find ourselves potentially in the midst of yet another one of history’s enduring epochs. Throughout the country, disaffected young people, progressive liberals, union members, peace activists and assorted leftists all have knitted together in an effort to rekindle the fiery passion of the ghost of American liberalism past. Members of the political left watched in horror as the blustering indignation of the Tea Party elevated unprecedentedly conservative Republicans into the chambers of power while removing the GOP’s few remaining moderate members from the nation’s capital.
“Occupy Wall Street” currently prides itself on its inclination toward social media and ad hoc forums where any and all voices are heard throughout the clutter of Zuccotti Park near Manhattan’s financial district. To the disaffected demonstrators, the thought of becoming a mainstream movement horrifies them, viewing the temptations of power that it brings as corrupting, and thus, antithetical to their cause. What they fail to understand is that to speak truth to power, you must yourself become powerful.
Thomas Paine wrote at the inception of the American republic that “we have it within our power to begin the world over again.” In the months to come, those seeking to return the levers of power away from the powerful and back toward the powerless may yet begin our politics anew.
Of the three successful episodes of history mentioned previously, all possessed three fundamental necessities in order to transform a movement into a revolution. Revolution requires an ideological direction, political platform and charismatic leader for the laws of the static quo to be broken.
Change cannot be our slogan; it must be our goal. And we are still waiting for our champion to lead us there.