2018
April
26
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

April 26, 2018
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Yvonne Zipp
Features Editor

When Americans talk about memorials in the South, they’re usually talking about Confederate statues.

Today, a new memorial is opening – one that those who have seen it say is unlike any that has come before.

In Montgomery, Ala., 800 rust-red blocks rise in the air. They are inscribed with the names of the more than 4,400 black Americans who were brutally murdered between 1877 and 1950 during a wave of racial terrorism that swept the South.

The lynching memorial honors the memories of the men, women, and children whose murders previously were not spoken of – their families terrorized into silence, the towns that perpetrated the crimes unwilling to talk about their past. One frequent inscription is “unknown.”

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is modeled after the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was created by the Equal Justice Initiative, whose director Bryan Stevenson has represented impoverished death-row inmates for decades and won a MacArthur award for his human rights work.

Mr. Stevenson, whose great-grandparents were enslaved, calls racism a pollution that infects the air we breathe. To cleanse the country, he says, it’s necessary to confront the truth. Only then can reconciliation come.

“In these communities where people actually cheered and celebrated while black people were burned and brutalized, you want people to recover, to repent,” he told The New York Times. “Not just because you want to see them on their knees, but because you know that on the other side of that there’s a kind of liberation. There’s a kind of redemption.” You can scroll down to catch a glimpse of his vision in our Viewfinder today.

Now to our five stories of the day, including the examination of the very different messages underlying mass protests in two countries.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Ahn Young-joon/AP
People watch a TV broadcast showing images of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (r.) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Seoul railway station in South Korea in March. Mr. Kim will be in uncharted territory when the third-generation autocrat crosses over to the southern half of the demilitarized zone separating the rival Koreas on April 27 to meet with Mr. Moon.

At a much-scrutinized event Friday – where even the timing of the handshake has been negotiated in advance – a North Korean leader will sit down with his South Korean counterpart for only the third time in history. For South Korea's Moon Jae-in, the summit is a crucial chance to prove engagement doesn't mean appeasement. 

Even with a strong economy, many Americans have grown detached from the job market. It's sparked a rare bipartisan moment: a focus on getting Americans back into the workforce. As economist Isabel Sawhill puts it, “Work provides self-respect and a sense of well-being and makes for healthier communities.”

SOURCE:

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
Narek Aleksanyan/PAN/AP
Protesters display an Armenian flag in Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia, on April 25. Several thousand protesters took to the streets of the Armenian capital after talks between the opposition and the acting prime minister were called off.

Does the Kremlin really fear democracy, as some have claimed? Russia's calm response to the "color" revolution going on in Armenia suggests not. Past Russian concern about revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia really probably was about NATO.

Nicaragua's revolutionary leader, Daniel Ortega, is suddenly facing his own revolution. Long seen as compliant in the face of increasing authoritarianism, the country has been roiled in the past week by protesters who refuse to back down until new elections are held. One key age group: People too young to remember the Sandinista revolution that brought Mr. Ortega to power.

On Film

Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures/AP
Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds star in 'A Quiet Place.' The Monitor’s Peter Rainer calls it 'one of the most inventive and beautifully crafted and acted horror movies [he’s] seen in a very long time.'

Peter Rainer does some real genre-jumping in his monthly best-of roundup. His picks include a story about a boy and his horse, a documentary that explores China’s Cultural Revolution in the context of three other radical late-’60s movements, and a horror film that innovates its way far beyond the standard scarefest. 


The Monitor's View

One reason so many migrants try to reach Europe or the United States is that both guarantee free and open debate – about issues such as immigration. Democracy is alluring in its demand of citizens to listen to one another out of respect for equality. Such ideals are rare in much of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East, which are the main sources of today’s mass migrations.

On Friday, the topic of migration will be on the table during a “working visit” by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the White House. Both Ms. Merkel and President Trump have defined their political identity on the issue. In 2015, she flung open Germany’s borders to more than 1 million refugees and migrants. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Trump has tried to close America’s borders, mainly to those from the south and from Muslim countries.

Each has been forced to learn they went too far. Merkel admits she made a mistake in welcoming so many migrants so quickly. Now an anti-immigrant party is her lead opposition. For Mr. Trump, resistance from Congress and the courts has made him back down on many promises, such as insisting Mexico pay for a border wall.

In addition, both now recognize a greater need to stem the flow of migrants at its source. Germany is funding aid programs in Africa, while the US has tried to curb the flow of people from Syria with, for instance, missile strikes after the recent use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians.

At a higher level, both the US and Germany (along with much of Europe) are in the midst of reshaping their collective identity via the push and pull of debate over immigration. Which values are at stake in allowing a more pluralistic society? Can new migrants keep their identity but coexist with a nation’s overarching identity? How should a country balance rule of law and sovereignty against a compassion for refugees or a need for workers?

Answering such questions takes more democracy, not less. In a speech this month, French President Emmanuel Macron decried the rise of anti-immigration parties in Europe, or what he called “selfish nationalism.” He said the political divide over values within the European Union is like a “civil war.” He called on EU leaders “to have a democratic, critical debate on what Europe is about” before the next election for a new European Parliament in 2019.

Would-be migrants to Europe or the US are attracted by such calls for a democratic way of resolving differences. In a new book titled “Suicide of the West,” American writer Jonah Goldberg writes, “Nearly all higher forms of social organization expand the definition of ‘us’ to permit large forms of cooperation.” Over centuries of history, smaller identities have been shed for more expansive ones.

The key in such debates is humility to listen as equals for the best solutions. In their respective countries, Merkel and Trump have had to listen to their opponents. Now they can also listen to each other.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Today’s contributor, who was having ongoing breathing difficulties because of allergies, shares how she was healed as a deeper sense of Christianity brought a new perspective of her real identity.


A message of love

Brynn Anderson/AP
An early visitor walks through part of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new memorial in Montgomery, Ala., built to honor thousands of people killed in racist lynchings and to help promote understanding and healing. Eight hundred steel monuments, inscribed with the locations of acts of violence and the names of those killed, are suspended from the memorial's ceiling.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Come back tomorrow. Staff writer Ryan Lenora Brown will have a story about another museum, this one in Congo, wrestling with a country’s difficult past. It’s a question about who controls history.

More issues

2018
April
26
Thursday
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