Regina Herzlinger, Ph.D., gives the keynote address
at the Health Services Symposium.
Posted on 04/08/2003 2:57:54 AM PDT by ninonitti
Regina Herzlinger is a professor at Harvard Business School. In her circle of friends, she said yesterday, it's not unusual for someone to know someone who was injured or even killed on Sept 11.
``So many were upper middle class people,'' she said. They were bond traders and stockbrokers and financiers; enormously prosperous, wonderfully smart.
Yet the soldiers now fighting at least partly to avenge their deaths come from a different America. They're not poor, necessarily, but not rich either. Surely they're neither business tycoons nor investment bankers in training.
Look at the daily thumbnail sketches in this newspaper. Most of the fighting force in Iraq, as was the case in Vietnam, are the near teenage children of the working class who enlisted right out of high school, like Wesley Rutledge, 19, of Everett, because the Marines seemed ``like a great way to get an education and a little more discipline.''
Or, like Kairi Tyrone Reid, 22, of Peabody, to provide for family. Reid's father died in 2000. Or, like Nick Santangelo, 22, of Dedham, both to serve the country and to help attain a professional dream: to become a firefighter.
In Regina Herzlinger's circle of friends, she said yesterday, ``almost nobody knows anybody with a child in the military.''
And so her husband's recent announcement ``at a typical Cambridge'' dinner party brought blistering anti-Bush (he's dumb) and anti-war (it's dumber) talk to a halt. ``Unlike most of his Harvard College 2000 classmates,'' her husband said, ``our son Alex chose to serve his country as a first lieutenant in the U.S. infantry.'' He has since been deployed to war.
Herzlinger described the scene perfectly in the Wall Street Journal. Stunned silence among ``the damask-upholstered chairs perched on antique rugs, (party-goers') charming, well-groomed images reflected in Chinese Chippendale-framed mirrors.''
``I think it's very easy to decry the war and even the soldiers who fight in it if you have no personal connection,'' she said yesterday. ``It's easy to stereotype or sneer at decisions by the leadership. . . . But opinions on issues change when you have skin in the game.''
Regina Herzlinger, a very gracious woman, did not say the following. So allow me: What she's really hit upon is a big reason why so many in elite media and elite academia and elite little bottled-water-swilling enclaves like parts of this town disdain the military - they've never met anybody in it.
Let's face it, lots of them think the army's for not-too-swift ne'er-do-wells. It's a class thing. You know, boys who join the Marines drive Dodge Durangos with flags on the antenna. They didn't get acceptances from Wesleyan or Harvard this week. And even if they did, they couldn't afford to go.
Regina Herzlinger, I repeat, did not say any of that. I did.
Still, it was wonderful yesterday to hear a Harvard professor at least allude to the root of so many Harvard-types' disrespect for the military, which is, largely, ignorance and class bias.
Herzlinger said she always thought her son Alex ``would become a constitutional lawyer'' and was ``shocked'' when he told her otherwise. ``But then we raised our children to feel an obligation to give back.''
Suddenly there was Alex, playing football at Harvard and hustling over to MIT for 10 hours a week of ROTC (Harvard had banned the program). Suddenly, he was off to Fort Drum in New York, and then to Iraq.
And suddenly Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School, a woman who's served on the boards of a dozen publicly traded firms, was scouring news coverage nightly just like Wesley Rutledge's mother from Everett or Kairi Reid's mother from Peabody or a hundred worried mothers from Alabama or Tennessee, all hoping for a glimpse or good news of their brave, young boys.
A month later we had another conference in Chicago. Although it is a much larger city, it is a much friendlier place. I never get the same feeling there as I do on the East Coast.
Boston is fun to visit. Articles like this point out to me again why you couldn't pay me enough to live there.
I have no one in the military and scan the faces and read about the families and mourn the dead.I pray for all and really think about the missing and POWS.BUMP.The difference must be elite thinking..detached from what gives them our freedom and way of life. Detached from the fact people are making sacrifices for us. I 'm humble and grateful for all. God bless our armed forces and God be with their loved ones.
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