2019 Labor Pains

I used to be Mexican until they kicked me out (married into a Mexican-American family but then she divorced me). We traveled to Mexico City a few times to visit family as well as around that area. We did have to watch out for theft (as warned by my in-laws) and we did see many beggars as well, so they both exist within the culture.I also repeatedly and consistently see the hardest working people both in Mexico and in the USA, though some of their kids have grown up with bad USA attitudes instead of good Mexican attitudes.Trump has it completely wrong (so what else is new?). Mexico is sending us some of their best hardest working people.Some months ago in discussing what immigrants (especially the illegals) actually contribute to tax revenues, I mentioned the A-TEAM, "Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower", from 1964: see W. Willard Wirtz, the Labor Secretary who came up with that ill-begotten idea, also the NPR report which is more informative and an interesting read. The Bracero Program which formalized the importing of guest agricultural workers from 1942 to its termination in 1964.Wirtz came up with the "brilliant" idea of recruiting high school athletes to replace the migrant workers. The first snag came from their coaches who didn't let their players sign up because they would miss summer training. Still, many high-schoolers did sign up. They didn't last long on the job. Besides the work and working conditions being too hard for them, the living conditions were beyond substandard. Many went AWOL after a few days and some camps went on strike. There truly is work that Americans refuse to do.

Sometimes I need to enter a store carrying a bag of something I bought from another store. Before I enter the second store, I tie the bag shut (think old-style plastic bags) to make it obvious that I could not simply drop something into it.Basically, I try to practice an old Chinese saying told to me by a Chinese co-worker (authentic Chinese, because he always drank the evilest smelling tea): "Never tie your shoes in a melon patch."Do you get it yet? You're in the middle of somebody else's melon patch and you bend over and reach down to the ground to tie your shoes. What does that look like to somebody watching you? Like you're trying to steal a melon. So the real lesson is to avoid any possible appearance of doing something wrong.