Michelle’s sermon sickening for us in real world

IBOW to no one in my admiration for Michelle Obama but I was more than a little dismayed to read her pious Sermon on the Mount regarding Corona. From the mansion where she is quarantined with Barack and the girls, the former first lady said this is a time for creativity and to reflect on what’s important in life.

To be fair she mentioned those who will suffer economically from the crisis before enthusing about how ‘it has forced us to sit down with each other, have real conversations, really ask questions and figure out how to keep ourselves occupied without just TV or computers’.

Michelle added that quarantine is ‘a good exercise in reminding us that we just don’t need a lot of the stuff that we have’.

‘When times are bad, having each other, having your health, we can do with a lot less,’ she pronounced.

We can deduce from her serenity that Barack has put the finishing touches to his post-White House memoir, the second half of the record-breaking deal that he and Michelle signed with Penguin Random House in 2017.

WITH millions in the bank, a network of powerful connections and a wardrobe full of designer clothes, Michelle, who openly embraced her post White House life as an opportunity to make real money, has earned the right to sit back and consider what is important to her.

Although she may sound like a pampered trustafarian making a virtue out of her privilege and sheer good looks, nothing could be further from the truth.

She was an outstanding public servant, inspired a generation with her pungent rhetoric and was a role model for women, particularly young black women.

Perhaps she wanted to sound upbeat and positive but the truth is that she came across as nauseating. Most people have spent the last few weeks cooped up with children in modest homes.

Many can’t think beyond the email from their boss advising them about being temporarily laid off or their asthmatic child’s hacking cough to wonder if they could do with fewer Gucci handbags.

The pandemic has brought out the good in us but it has also encouraged a certain arrogance and superiority from some quarters. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have crowed to me about how much they are enjoying self-isolation, retreating into their solitary cocoons and rich intellectual life, free from the burden of mindless social engagements.

They imply that anyone who is clawing at the walls or howling at the moon like me is a shallow pack animal with zero coping skills.

AND what about those who like nothing more than telling us how they have gratefully seized on this crisis as a time for slow living, for spiritual growth, communing with nature and discovering parts of their children’s personalities they never knew existed.

Spare me those who are already well on their way to conquering the oboe, learning a fourth language and losing weight.

I have news for anyone who stubbornly persists in the lie that there are positives to this grim and soul-destroying half-life; most of us don’t need to be prisoners in our own homes to enjoy the fields of daffodils and brighter evenings or even to lose a few pounds.

We are multi-taskers; we can do several things at once. Watch and learn.

I don’t need to be stuck indoors to realise what’s truly important in life .

All I have to do is watch my children’s faces get paler and their spirits wilt as the days fold into one another, depriving them of the oxygen of human society and a lively routine.

It is true what the poets say that ‘This too shall pass’.

It had better, because, to put it more bluntly, it’s crap.