I heard a very interesting discussion on the kind of legacy that singer John Lennon left, as yesterday was the 25th anniversary of his death. It was correctly pointed out that, although John Lennon claimed to support peace and criticized the US involvement in Vietnam, he remained remarkably silent through the invasions of Prague and Afghanistan, as well as other Cold War Communist actions during his lifetime. It was further noted that his failures as a father to eldest son Julian underscored a hypocrisy in Lennon's life, and that his advocacy for drug use drove many youth to self destruction through their own "experimentation" inspired by the ex Beatle.

I found all of the comments compelling, and, to some extent valid. If you measure Lennon's life up to the time of his assassination, his contribution (outside of his unquestionable MUSICAL contribution) may have been almost as much negative as positive. But rather than indicting Lennon, perhaps we should indict ourselves for equating musical talent with statesmanship, for giving philosophy the status of hard fact. If Lennon's influence was negative, it was only because we followed him, like the proverbial Pied Piper, out of town into the magical kingdom we WANTED to see.

But more than that, Lennon's life was cut short before he could remedy the mistakes that even he had begun to recognize. The better part of the final five years of his life was spent in seclusion, as he tried to be a better father to son Sean and better husband to wife Yoko. And he worked hard to kick his heroin addiction, as described in the song "Cold Turkey".

I am an admirer of Lennon and his musical contributions. Although my philosophy differs from his, it was very similar for more than thirty years of my life, before I began to take a harder look at what I REALLY believed, and what were RESPONSIBLE solutions to the problems that plague our society. In short, the past five years of my life have been far more substantial than the first thirty. John Lennon, being human, was no different in that his youth was spent discovering who he was and what he believed, and that at the time of his death, he had spent a remarkably small portion of his life becoming what he was truly meant to become. Like others whose life was cut short, it would be an injustice to justify his legacy on a simple scale of "good vs. bad". There's a whole lot of living he was never given the chance to do, and a whole lot off answers he hadn't yet found. If he had lived even ten years longer, we might have had a chance to view him in an entirely different light.