Perspective and a balanced view of history is so important. NO WHERE in Nancy Oku Bright's piece did she discuss the REASONS why the coup happened. To me that purposeful neglect and the attempo to re-write history is sad but predictable. For example, while she emphasized that Samuel Kanyon Doe was only a Master Sergeant and had only an 8th grade education, she missed the important implication of that fact --- education and sociopolitical elevation was reserved primarily for the children of the settler class prior to 1980! She also had a number of facts wrong in her pice. For one thing, Samuel Doe did NOT lead the raid on the mansion. It was Col. William Jerbo. What concerns me the most about all this is that as a nation, we've done a poor job of preserving the historical lessons we should have learned from 1980. As a result, an entire generation of Liberians born years after the coup and grew up in the shadow of Charles Taylor's devastation, have an appropriate disdain for political violence. At the same time however, they have no real undestanding of the root social and political factors the led to the 1980 revolution. To them, these events are all part of the same misguided train of events that stunted Liberia's growth. Sadly, they know and understand precious little about the vulgar class cleavages that characterized Liberian society for a century leading up to the coup in 1980.
Men and women are capable of great things but we are also capable of amazing amounts of selfishness and short-sightedness.
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