Dear Editor,

There seems to be an outpouring of articles mourning the loss of Steve Jobs.  This is in no way offensive, but after the second editorial about him, there really needs to be some perspective.  Obviously the death of any human being is tragic and pancreatic cancer is certainly a terrible way to die, but such tearful remembrances of a man that, realistically, was totally unknown to the authors, demonstrate the rather questionable priorities of the public.  Steve Jobs was the CEO of the currently largest corporation in the world.  He created products that the two columnists who wrote tributes to him both professed an emotional connection to.  This makes one ask, doesn’t this make him an excellent craftsman of the Apple brand rather than an “objectively good person” as Nathan Fatal described him?  In fact, in creating these products, he used Chinese sweatshops described by the U.K. newspaper “The Daily Mail.”  These iPhone sweatshops required nets at the tops of buildings due to worker suicides and worker hospitalization is a relatively common occurrence. How can a man be “objectively good” or any different from other cynical CEOs if he is making his money in the usual way; by sending jobs to the lowest bidding overseas contractors? This is where priorities come in.  When we mourn Steve Jobs over a person like Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader in the African-American civil rights movement who died on the same day as Jobs, we are saying something.  While we generally say that we want equality and the betterment of humanity, our actions demonstrate that we don’t care about these things as much as our iPhones, and the person who can bring us an iPhone is ultimately more important.

–          Matthew Anderson