2022
November
29
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

November 29, 2022
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Ali Martin
California Bureau Writer

Lavialle Campbell has been an artist for as long as she can remember. At age 5, she would get her work done in school so she could go outside and paint a brick wall with water. At 7, she was collecting seed beads for small projects. Art got her through childhood illnesses, and, in adulthood, two bouts with cancer. 

“It saved my life,” she says, “because I always had art to fall back on, so whenever something happened, I wouldn’t get depressed. I would have something to work on.”

The pandemic – and her retirement from a career as a legal secretary – brought her something she’d never had before: time. The result was an explosion of creativity and six exhibitions – one of which I visited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in Southern California.

“Of Rope and Chain Her Bones Are Made” is a collection of works by nine women, celebrating the handiwork that underlies the often invisible work associated with womanhood. The exhibit highlights the dichotomy of strength and femininity, and is full of whimsy: ropes dangling from a wall that turn out to be cast bronze; playful hanging sculptures made from salvaged plastics; ceramic beads shaped like little pieces of bone, strung together to make a curtain. 

“All expression is valuable,” says Ms. Campbell, whose pieces include an improvised black-and-white quilt and a number of ceramic sculptures.

Black-eyed peas appear in all of her exhibitions, a triumphant nod to the sting of racism she felt in graduate school. Ms. Campbell had created an altar as a final art project, honoring her grandmother and great-grandmother, who were enslaved. The teacher got angry about the tribute, which included foods specific to Black culture, and humiliated Ms. Campbell in front of the class. The peas, she says, are a scar from those days – and a satisfying reminder of her success.

Invariably, that success uplifts women. “I want to represent women who are always in the picture but never get credit for it,” she says.


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Today’s stories

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The big question: If most of the trading in cryptocurrencies is high-risk speculation and they will require traditional regulation anyway, does the world really need such alternative money?

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The Monitor's View

Reuters
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (left) and a colleague bow Nov. 26 after she announced she has resigned as Democratic Progressive Party chair to take responsibility for the party's performance in the local elections.

Last weekend, when protesters across China called on Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to step down over his strict “zero-COVID” policies, just 100 miles away in Taiwan, the leader of the island nation’s ruling party did just that. On Saturday evening, President Tsai Ing-wen resigned as head of the Democratic Progressive Party following the party’s major defeat in local elections.

“We humbly accept ... the decision of the people of Taiwan,” Ms. Tsai wrote on Facebook. She’ll remain president until the end of her second term in 2024. In a 2020 national election, she won by a landslide.

One key reason for the party’s defeat in the city and county races was Ms. Tsai’s fumbled response to a surge in COVID-19 cases earlier this year. Also, the government faced controversy over its handling of vaccines after an initial success against the pandemic in 2020.

In China, the official response to public anger over COVID-19 policies – especially citywide lockdowns – has been a severe police crackdown. In sharp contrast, similar discontent in Taiwan has been peacefully channeled through a thriving democracy, resulting in victories for the main opposition party, the Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as KMT. Even the former top official in the fight against the pandemic, Chen Shih-chung, lost in his bid to become mayor of the capital, Taipei.

China touts its authoritarian model as best for the world. Yet Ms. Tsai’s reaction to her party’s loss shows a key quality rarely evoked in a dictatorship. Just after her election in 2016, her first instruction to her party and supporters was to “be humble and be more humble.”

She needed it herself. In June last year, after Taiwan saw a surge in the pandemic, Ms. Tsai said, “As your president, I want to take this opportunity to convey my deepest sorrow and apologies.”

Elected leaders – unlike in China – must accept either the admiration or admonishment of voters. “Humble human beings feel themselves to be dwellers on earth (the word humility derives from humus),” wrote John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney, after Ms. Tsai’s 2016 speech.

“They know they do not know everything; they are well aware they are not God, or a minor deity,” he wrote in The Conversation.

The protesters in China have said as much.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

When disheartening situations arise, we can turn to God for a spiritual view of reality that comforts, uplifts, and brings joy and progress.


A message of love

Seth Wenig/AP
A large eye adorns steps as part of an art installation entitled "Eyes on Iran" in New York, Nov. 28, 2022. This piece as well as other works of art are displayed at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park and speak to the current protests happening in Iran.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Don’t miss tomorrow’s trip with our Stephanie Hanes to a Florida community that challenged Hurricane Ian – and won. 

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2022
November
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