Our Rotting Apple

I woke up this morning to hear about the death of Steve Jobs. The only Apple item I own is my iPod Touch (and I intend to own a Mac in the near future) so while I didn't gnash my teeth and throw myself to the ground in an expression of grief, I was sad to hear about his passing but my reasons are slightly different from the average Apple user's. (Ghana's) Development agenda or lack of it has been on my mind lately. I look around at all aspects of our daily lives and it is immediately apparent that there's no cohesion or continuity in many things: no specific plan, no VISION. Even in the law, we have a many, many laws that affect the same subject matter but there's not much consolidation or a holistic approach. We simply take things as they come and address them piecemeal, so our 'big picture' is very fragmented, if visible at all. In education, there's no national 'plan', we sing to the tune of political manifestos, playing cheerfully with children's lives and manage to be righteously indignant when the system fails them . Even the traffic situation in big cities across the country is a manifestation of our lack of vision. We are allowing our apple to rot while others built magnificent legacies based on vision. Steve Jobs is credited with being a visionary, so I'm mourning his death for that reason. His vision, his approach and inventions revolutionized technology, perhaps even the world. ( I say perhaps because despite his wide reach, my old grandmother will only associate a Apple out of which a bite has been taken with a dustbin. Many in our world are only concerned with real fruits...for consumption...anyway..) His background wasn't exactly the prototype for a springboard to success but he had his vision. He started small and was consistent with his ideals, working towards their accomplishment. Now apple could probably charge $300 for a 32mb pendrive and it would sell out. That's a lesson we can all learn. Work hard to make your own impact in the world around you through excellence. The world needs more visionaries, we're too focused on today, on Now, forgetting that most of us, by God's Grace, will live on till Tomorrow.