A short story
My Other Life in the Fiction section.

I have finally returned to telling the story of my cruise to the Caribbean. Day 7 was a momentous day in my long life - I achieved a life-long goal.

You can find my new writing under Non-Fiction/Memoirs/Cruise-Log 2023/Cruise Log - Day 07

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More encouragement from readers means more writing from the author.
Dr. P-J
5/11/23

​This article is misleading.

The children were NOT employees.
"Officials said the children were not paid . . . the children were visiting their parent" and therefore, were NOT employed by McDonalds.

You can question the parent's judgement, if you wish, but putting McDonalds in the headline and using their corporate logo is irresponsible click bait. Next up - parent forces child to clean her room! Illegal exploitation of child labor? Or good parenting? 

It's as I see it, this McDonald's problem, it's a parenting problem. And I wouldn't judge the parent without knowing more about their situation.

But I'm also wondering where the line is.

We can thank labor unions for ending the child labor practices illustrated in the following slide show.

​I have a huge conflict about parents employing their children. Is it exploitation? Or is it teaching them life skills, keeping them close, perhaps the only way they can spend time with their kids what with working three jobs?​

But when the Instacart delivery person has their 8 year old helping carry the groceries, is it cute or is it illegal?

There has always been an exception for farm kids, for example, who, on private property, operate machinery and sometimes get permanent injuries. Working in the family business is legal in many situations.

When I lived in Orange, CA (the last time, hopefully) I had a guy turn up at my door with a lawn mower and offer to mow the lawns for $30. Mike was working more than full time in the waspy airy ancient garage and I couldn't push the lawn mower anymore after the time the lady tried to kill us with her car (metaphorically speaking).

The lawn wanted mowing so I said yes.

Flash forward - it's a few months later and he's mowing the lawns regularly for cheap - with just the lawn mower that he pushes around, and one day he shows up with a kid, about 8, who has a broom. He mows, the kid sweeps . . . something like that. Anyhow, I was very uncomfortable when I paid the guy - knowing that I was paying for child labor. So I told him I wasn't going to need his services anymore, that I was going to do it myself. Which was a lie. I got someone else. Someone with a business license. DOH.
​
So was I doing good, not being an illegal child labor employer? Or was I depriving that kid of a meal?

by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.

People sure take offense easily regarding this meme, speaking with bitterness about being treated poorly at work . . . confounding “job” with “career.” Example – a job is teaching fifth grade at Plumas Elementary School. A career is teaching in public school.

The idea seems pretty straight forward - my career choice never stopped loving me. I might have stopped loving it and changed careers (small business owner, warehouse manager, grade school teacher, perpetual graduate student/teaching assistant, union activist, social justice activist, Dr. P-J, lazy dilettante . . . )
. . . but a man stopping loving me? - Well that is a different story. I had a "starter" marriage, once upon a time . . . that ended badly when he started loving the prospect of wealth more than whatever feelings he originally had for me . . . back in the day, by cracky.

The women who attack this post (insensitive post? really?) would seem to be taking the position that "following" your man is a good life choice. Lady Gaga and I would argue otherwise. THAT is what the post is about - follow your OWN dreams, not your man's dreams . . .

I like men. I have a life partner (18 months until the 50th anniversary of our union - we kissed on the dock in Santa Cruz in December of 1974 with Orion's belt blazing and the Ferris Wheel spinning, across the water on the brightly lit colorful Santa Cruz Boardwalk, with the roller coaster screaming in the background . . . the stuff dreams are made of) but I don't FOLLOW my man. He is my life partner. And we support each other in reaching our personal goals EVERY DAY . . . for all these years . . .

So one of the comments included the phrase “the devil doesn't really need an advocate,” which I totally love. I’m smirking about it as I type this . . . so that gives rise to the rest of this article.

When I was in high school, I had many conversations with my father in which he played devil's advocate and gently probed my arguments in support of many different issues - women's rights, the war in Vietnam, racism, the dress code at the high school . . . he never told me what arguments would serve me well - he showed me what arguments I would face and I devised the arguments that best supported my claims.

He was a wily debater too. Way smarter than those dumbass Republicans with their fallacious argumentation. He subscribed to a wide range of magazines and journals and some racist screed provided fodder at the Pineo house . . . he told us he didn't want Big Brother to identify his leftist leanings through his subscriptions, so he brought a variety of texts into the house . . .

My mother might have seemed like she was following his dreams - she was a stay-home mother until I, the eldest of six children, was in college, but having a family WAS her dream. Then when the youngest of my siblings started school, my mother went back to college (Cal State Fullerton, University of California at Irvine), became a teacher, and eventually took a Ph.D. and finished off her second career as a well-respected professor at Fullerton Community College.

She served the large Vietnamese demographic at FCC so well that one man, a former general in the South Vietnamese Army, gave her a wall clock in the shape of Vietnam, made of beautiful burlwood. The Vietnamese students who came into her office and saw that clock and felt safer, and they were.

And this was not a safe time for Vietnamese immigrants in Southern California. I was taking two classes at Santiago Community College (formerly Santa Ana Junior College) where my dad was teaching. I was taking Fortran and Basic at the same time – which is like learning two different foreign languages at the same time – very tricky. Anyhow, the Fortran teacher was a nasty racist who called out and openly criticized the group of Vietnamese men in the back of the room, for whom one was serving as a translator. The teacher basically told that ringleader to STFU in HIS classroom and made some disparaging remarks about their kind not belonging in a United States college class if they couldn’t speak English. What a dick. But I digress? And I’m using vulgar language?

So, in conclusion, the devil doesn't really need an advocate . . . LMAO