I Think I Will Say It, Thank You

Among the many otherwise not-as-significant things that I do, is to serve my MIT class as its secretary.  If you are not a member of the class, or not associated with the Institute in any way, the job of a class secretary there consists of three main duties -- the usual (and rare) administrative tasks of correspondence for a class of maybe 900 surviving members; searching for lost classmates so the Alumni Office can contact them; and writing a bimonthly column of "notes from the class" for the bimonthly alumni magazine Technology Review.

In the last role, I have written over 200 such columns over 40 years, most of which consist of 5-10 alumni having dropped a little item about what they've been doing since last they wrote (or in some cases, forever; we still get occasional first-time contributors).  It's fun to see what they have accomplished, whether family, profession, hobby, whatever.  Since in a class of 950 you may only recognize 75-80 names or so as familiar, and only really "know" 50, it's pretty cool to see.

At the end of each one, I consider dropping something in about me or my family.  Generally, if I have very few other contributions to form the column, or if something has happened to me worth noting, I'll say what I've been doing.  It normally does not get me in Dutch, at least until now.

The lag time from my writing the column to receiving the copy in print is about 4-5 months, so when I finish an issue and email a copy to the publisher, I send a copy to the class email list so they can see what their classmates have done in something closer to real time.  Around the same time, the class receives the printed copy of the magazine for which the Class News is then four months old.

Monday I did just that, emailing the "new" article to the magazine and the class, only to receive an interesting reply.  I'll share it here for you:  "Please no more rants about Obamacare. This was not the place for it."  Since I hadn't mentioned anything related to health insurance in the email, I had to look back and figure out what I had even done.

Sure enough, at the end of the class notes in a previous version, one or two back -- from four months ago -- I had summarized the article with a brief paragraph, noting that, like many our age (our class is most all about 63 years old), my family had our health insurance cost double despite no health change in 2014.  Since I was writing to all MIT students, I pointed out the irony that we were being told that we were not intelligent enough to decide how much risk we were willing to take on (i.e., by purchasing a high-deductible, low-cost plan that is now illegal).

If anyone should appreciate that, it would be a bunch of MIT grads, who generally dislike having our intelligence insulted.  I never mentioned the term "Obamacare"and referred only to my insurance company, and to "... people who know better have decided they know more than I do about my [tolerance for] medical risk."  Yes, I meant the Democrats in Congress who rammed the bill through despite the country's protests.  No, I didn't mention them, or Congress, or the government -- or Jonathan Gruber.

But after thinking the whole thing through, I've decided that if I want to rant about Obamacare, I'll decide what the place for it is, and not be pressured otherwise.

Because, after all, 14 people died in France last week because of their determination to speak freely, and in their honor and their memory, I will say what I feel, where I feel it can be said.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton