I read the following about the Obamas and felt a flicker of appreciation.
People magazine this week said it interviewed Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama and his family in their Chicago home earlier this summer and came away with seven rules that keep the family organized and happy.
1 – “No whining, arguing or annoying teasing,” says wife Michelle Obama.
I can already hear snickering how the “no arguing” rule keeps Barack Obama away from joint town hall meetings with McCain, and how the no “annoying teasing” explains why be believes John McCain’s “Celebrity” ad was out of bounds.
But as for the “no whining” rule, I say, “Amen!”
For example, I can’t stand it when you hear someone looking a gift horse in the mouth, and lamenting that the government isn’t giving them enough in economic stiumulus checks:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, complained the government’s $600 economic stimulus check was only enough to buy “a pair of earrings” while stumping for her husband.
“You’re getting $600 – what can you do with that?” Mrs. Obama said in Pontiac, Michigan last week. “Not to be ungrateful or anything, but maybe it pays down a bill, but it doesn’t pay down every bill every month. The short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good, and it may even feel good that first month when you get that check, and then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings.”
She made these remarks at a “working women’s roundtable discussion.”
Or people who choose to buy expensive items and then go on and on all the time about the high cost of living:
Not everyone can afford to keep it all together, especially here in Muskingum County, where, according to the census, the median household income in 2004 was $37,192, below both the Ohio and national average. Out of that, there’s the mortgage. And child care. Health care. Education. Lessons. “I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”
One whining about the cost of say, fruit, and the difficulties of finding time to buy produce:
“Now we’re keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house. But you have to go to the fruit stand a couple of times a week to keep that fruit fresh enough that a six-year-old—she’s not gonna eat the pruney grape, you know. At that point it’s, like, ‘Eww!’ She’s not gonna eat the brown banana or the shrivelledy-up things. It’s got to be fresh for them to want it. Who’s got time to go to the fruit stand? Who can afford it, first of all?”
I mean, some people, they see sinister forces everywhere, whining about what they deem insufficient labeling of products:
“And the notion of trying to think about a lunch every day! . . . So you grab the Lunchables, right? And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that’s juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there’s high-fructose corn syrup in everything we’re eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t even know. . ”
To listen to some people, you would think the average American is beset by $600 earrings, the $10,000 summer camps, unaffordable fruit and hidden poisons on the store shelves, that everyone was falling to pieces:
“I wake up every morning wondering how on earth I am going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day. I know that everybody in this room is going through this. That is the dilemma women face today. Every woman that I know, regardless of race, education, income, background, political affiliation, is struggling to keep her head above water.” (This presumably includes her friend Oprah.)
And I think one of the worst whines of all is someone who endlessly blames the other gender for their problems.
“What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.”
Michelle Obama, I stand with you against whining.