Aspiring to be humble? Sarah's take.
It's coming either way - how will you react?
Last week - also known as a millennium during the campaign season - the controversy of the moment was Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying at a Trump rally, "[M]y kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble." Vice President Harris does have two stepchildren, so this was seemingly a dig about her not having any biological children. Not surprisingly, Sanders’ comment came up during Harris’s interview with Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper. Harris responded, “I don't think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.”
I also struggled with Harris’s answer.
Humility was my word of the year several years ago, and a generous listener made me the beautiful reminder pictured above. Despite moving on to other words of the year, it hangs in my closet, and I see it every day.
Humility has always been the companion of wisdom. As a child, it was held up to me as a worthy goal. As an adult, it has given me much-needed perspective on my most difficult moments. I am not that special, which means my problems aren’t either. Others have been here before me. I am not alone.
To me, the opposite of humility is standing in front of an “I was right about everything” sign without a trace of irony.
I certainly don’t aspire to that.
The word that struck me in Kamala’s answer wasn’t humble; it was “aspire”. In my experience (and I bet in Kamala’s), humility will find you … one way or another. It will find you through illness or loss or traffic or having to reset a password for the fifth time in a day. It will find you whether you have kids or not.
It will undoubtedly find you if you are a woman in the public eye, and if Governor Sanders disagrees, then she hasn’t googled her name recently to see the first suggestion Google offers next. Because she is the youngest governor in America right now and the first female governor in Arkansas’s history, the first thing that comes up when you start typing in her name is “Sarah Huckabee Sanders weight loss.”
Yes, humility will find you. The choice is what you do when it does. Do you see your struggle as a shared struggle? Or do you use the lie of terminal uniqueness to tear others down so you can seem big?
I am not arguing that Governor Sanders should have bemoaned the struggle she shares with Vice President Harris as a female politician. This is an election season, and they are both professionals. However, Governor Sanders could have taken a pass on that very gendered line of attack.
Madeline Albright once said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.” I’ll set the bar even lower. There is a special place in hell for women who use sexist attacks on other women.
Without humility, it is a hell entirely of their own making.
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Also, there is a time and a place for humility. As a young, female engineer who was taught to be humble, I did not boast about my accomplishments at work, and you know what happened? The men around me took credit for my work. They boasted and bragged about these things that "they" did. And you know what else happened? They got a raise and a promotion. I got a developing review because I "didn't do anything." I'm so tired of this idea that women should not take credit for their work. Do I think we should be obnoxious about it? Absolutely not. But now at work, I proudly say,"I accomplished this." "This change was my work." "I am excellent at my job."
Humility and humble strike me somewhat differently *and* I think we as white women also need to see the history and racism of a white SHS saying a Black woman aspiring to be president should be “humble.” Are we asking if DJT is humble? Pres Obama? Bush? Clinton?
My quick $0.02 before the 4th graders come back from music.