LIKE CRABS
"If Liberians want to continue living like Crabs we should consider living in the waters"By: Roberta Williams
E-mail: rwilliams6@wellspan.org
As I look around me, our various Liberian communities, organizations, churches, social events, government officials, businesses, neighbors, friends, families and education, etc., we are living like CRABS. We know in a box full of live crabs, if one crab tries to get out of a box another one or two will try to pull him down. Let’s compare ourselves and see how close we live to the water or the land. Let see how we compare to the crabs in the water.
Our communities
The Liberian organizations - lot of Liberian organizations come up with good ideas and unite us to help our people back home. We host meetings in our homes, halls and so forth. We elect bodies to govern the groups. We establish rules to abide by within the groups. We end the meeting in joyous styles by celebrating the start of something great. We feel so proud of ourselves for coming up with such a “good thing” to help our people that we can’t wait for the next meeting. We collect dues and host rallies to help the cause. Now, what is wrong here, absolutely nothing, this is where the good ends.
While a handful is working to get things moving in the right directions, or should I say “get out of the box like the crab”, you have the mass out there creating ways to make the leaders look bad by discouraging some of the members. They will find faults in everything the handful comes up with and go out of their way to bring confusion within the group. For some crazy reason they are normally the majority. Why, because in Liberia we were trained to believe only the leaders are the respected ones, they are the one who gets the honor and their say is God or so they think.
Now that we all are train to believe “the leader takes all”, of course everyone wants to be THE leader of the group regardless of if he/she knows how to lead or not. We never take into consideration we may not have the experience for the job. George Weah is a good example of this factor. So we let ourselves believe if I am not at the top then I am not important so therefore I should fight anyone who is until I am at the top. No account will be calculated correctly as long as the majority is not satisfied with the fact that he/she is not in charge. They will curse you up and down, talked about your family negatively all day long on the internet and on the phone in stead of coming forth with what is eating them up. The will be the ones not attending meetings or helping to do anything toward the cause.
Solution:
- Come to meetings and pay your dues, dues paying members have more power then they realize.
- Bring your ideas and solution to the table, don’t just sat there and say nothing and expect people to know you are boiling inside.
- Don’t promise anything you can not deliver and of all, try to be very respectful in presenting your case.
- Like I always tell my children, if you are going to talk to me like you don’t have any sense, then I will answer you like I am even less senseless then you or tune you out completely.
- Don’t go with an “I am going to cause trouble today” attitude, people will only hear your attitude and not your view point.
- Keep it friendly, after all these are the same people you will be dancing and drinking with during conventions and meetings
