by Keith Bassham
You have to love the Steve Jobs story at all sorts of levels. Thinking about him and his friend Steve Wozniak hand-soldering parts and circuits for the first wood-encased Apple computer in his family garage in the 70s is pure Edison. And for us here at the Tribune, virtually everything we do happens on a Jobs-inspired piece of technology. Granted, you could print a magazine without all the stuff on our desks, but why would you? Even the typography — the shapes of the letters and placement on the page — bears in some way the mark of Steve Jobs.
But lest you think this column is just another piece of hagiography, I maintain Mr. Jobs was less an inventor and more an improver. He did not invent the mouse, or the GUI (graphic user interface) — those things originated at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. And Dan Bricklin came up with Visicalc (the first killer-app and great-great grandfather of Lotus and Excel) for the Apple II, making it a business computer rather than a game machine. On the other hand, putting Unix way down deep into the Apple computers and founding Pixar is pretty cool, let alone iTunes, iPods, and iPads.
Enough of that. Jobs had genius and vision, and given 20 more years, who knows what other products and tools he would devise. The point I want to make is the world very nearly missed the gifts Steve Jobs would bring.
In 2005, Mr. Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University. In that speech he tells us how he came to be:
“It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: ‘We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?’
They said: ‘Of course.’
My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.”
Steve Jobs’s biological mother, we learn later, was 23-year-old Joanne Schieble, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin who became pregnant in 1954. Her parents would not allow her to marry the child’s father, a Syrian immigrant. Although abortion was illegal in most of the country in the 1950s, exceptions were sometimes granted, and many abortions occurred. However, adoption and the giving of life was preferred. Joanne chose to give her child life, and to give another couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, the joy of parenthood, and with that choice she gave us a world very different from one in which there would be no Steve Jobs.
November is National Adoption Month. Every November, beginning with 1984 when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the first National Adoption Week (an idea he got from Governor Michael Dukakis who had done the same thing in Massachusetts in 1976) a Presidential Proclamation launches a month of activities and programs to build awareness of adoption in the nation. For more information, see http://www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/nam/about.cfm on the Web.
Christians especially should take note of Adoption Month. Adoption and promoting adoption is a way of placing emphasis on the positive side of the anti-abortion and pro-life message. There are more than 40 references to orphans in the Old Testament, and if the blood of bulls and goats could provide an atonement that resulted in mercy and care for the unwanted in Israel, how much more should the blood of Christ produce in our hearts for those in the New Testament era?
And then there are the utilitarian arguments. Studies show that adopted children score better than non-adopted siblings and peers in a variety of ways — they generally do better in school, have good relationships, and are more optimistic, all due no doubt to love and care of a home and parents who took the initiative to bring them into that home.
Some children, of course, have great needs, often because of time spent in foster care systems, but that is all the more reason Christians should consider adoption as part of a ministry lifestyle.
Even those not able to adopt can help. Start by locating your local pregnancy crisis center. Offer support and get some information. Think how the world may change when you make the right choice.