Humble Pie
A country singer, a feminist icon and a king walk into a bar….
….and if they happen to be Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and King Harald of Norway, you just know they are going to hit it off.
Other than living long, productive lives and passing away within days of each other, it wouldn’t seem like Dolly, Gloria and Harald would have much in common. Early years ranging from outright poverty in the American south to boundless wealth in the European north followed by lives spanning music halls to women’s equality and the care of a nation. None of which, by the way, were predestined to succeed.
Few would ever have thought of putting these three people in the same room, let alone in the same sentence, yet, the reaction to their lives and deaths have been strikingly similar. What everyone seems to have felt acutely, is a strong sense of gratitude, a sentiment more often felt at the loss of those closest to us, not celebrities in a different stratosphere.
Yet, here we are, feeling grateful. Because what Dolly, Gloria, and Harald had in common - and in abundance - was empathy; an ability to see and appreciate others, an ability, and determination, to put others first. A humility born out of circumstance and experience that led to lives in many ways devoted to others.
The child who learned to love books thanks to Dolly Parton’s ‘Imagination Library’, the woman who gained respect in her workplace and ownership over her own body thanks to Ms Steinem, and the parent who saw the King himself standing in the midst of the utter devastation of the Utøya massacre.
But does our deep sense of gratitude for these good works and these good people reflect a deeper sense of loss, not just for the people, but for the values they represent?
As a reaction to the generations who were taught humility and self sacrifice as aspirational virtues, we have spent the past decades laser focused on putting ourselves and our own needs first; our own happiness, our own satisfaction, our own success. Our role models are no longer people who contribute to society, but those who master it. Those who take power and lord it over others, feasting so rarely, if ever, on a slice of humble pie.
We have somehow made the mistake of believing that humility and success are mutually exclusive, when in fact, if the lives of Dolly, Gloria and Harald have taught us anything, it is that they are more than compatible.
The ‘three wise (wo)men’ of this story all fought back against the structures that sought to confine them: the poverty, the patriarchy, the rigidity. They did it by including others, not excluding them, by showing humility, empathy and respect, and in doing so they showed us that you don’t need to be a country singer, a feminist icon or a king to make a difference in the world.
The choices they made are choices we can make; the values they lived by can become our values, and we can mobilize our sense of gratitude to ensure that the world they wanted to create, becomes the world we create.
Perhaps this, more than anything, is the lesson we carry with us on this day, twenty-five years to the day of the devastating, world altering events of September 11, 2001.