Outta Touch

    Who is Ms. Obama?
    To be honest, if you'd asked me yesterday what Michelle's favorite food was, I couldn't have told you.  To get to know the lady a bit more, I looked up articles about her online.  Today, thanks to reading the New Yorker's profile of the First Lady, in detail, I now know that her favorite food is macaroni and cheese. 
    I found out more than this, of course.  I now know she is sometimes-refreshingly outspoken, she has an older brother, that she wore a yellow dress for a yearbook photo, that she went to prestigious schools, and that she's trained as a lawyer.  What I was looking for, though, wasn't just the past.  It was the outlook toward the future.  What's Michelle's view of the world?  After reading about her today, I have one thing to say: the woman is out of touch.  There's just no other way to put it.  She doesn't realize how much she has, and how much higher her standard of living was than the average American even before becoming the First Lady.  She doesn't exude a sense of thankfulness; she exudes a sense of entitlement.  And when someone's bitten by the entitlement bug, nothing's possible to be thankful for.  All you can see is how much more you deserve, 'cause you're YOU!
    When you fly to Copenhagen and tell the International Olympic Committee that you've sacrificed to ride a jet in absolute luxury to make a sales pitch (in which you make up a story about sitting in your dad's lap watching Carl Lewis play, though you would have been at least 20 years old at the time), and wait to be joined by your husband on his own little jet a few days later -- and you call that a sacrifice, there's something wrong with you.  (See the text of the speech here).
   When you try to tell low-income women in Ohio that you understand their plight because you, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer making millions each year -- are just like them, there's something wrong with you.  Sure, they might not have had the school loans to pay off that you had, but that's 'cause they didn't get to go to college!
   When you have a job in healthcare as a VP where your salary is $300k a year (where as soon as you leave, the jobs connected to your position are absorbed by others), and yet you try to act as if you're completely outside of corporate America and the healtchare business -- there's something wrong with you.
   When in the sphere you had control over you've spearheaded an effort to dump low-income patients onto other hospitals, and yet you trumpet your committment to the heath of all patients across the nation (especially those getting obese), there's something wrong with you.
   When you've flourished financially and personally in a country, enjoy celebrity status where people care about your favorite foods, your husband, your kids, you get interviews and fanmail, yet all you can look at is what that country didn't give you -- there's something wrong with you.
   The woman is out of touch with reality.