I believe that viewers who have watched this film will notice a tiny detail: Brad Pitt failed to arrange for someone to take over the Mexican nanny Amelia in time to take care of his children because his wife was shot while traveling in Morocco; Amelia's son is about to get married. Although he repeatedly explained the situation to his employer, Brad Pitt on the other end of the phone was still very "unreasonable" and asked Amelia to give up attending the wedding and take care of the children at home. Radical viewers might think that Brad Pitt is too impersonal, that this is downright capitalist exploitation. But if we discuss this incident in the judicial system of the United States, there may be a different answer.
Most states in the United States have a law that is very strange to us Chinese, that is, "Children under the age of 12 shall not be left alone", and it is also a felony. If this law is violated, it is very likely to be charged with child abuse, or even more serious. will be deprived of custody of the children. As long as there are children under the age of 12 in the family, parents who need to go out temporarily to do errands must entrust someone to take care of them, but they can't help in vain. They have to pay people's wages, and the wages must be paid according to the standards set by the federal minimum wage law. It's about $5, and it's illegal to pay less. However, there are too few legal residents in the United States willing to do childcare work. It is often those teenage middle school students who are willing to make some pocket money for this. Most people think that the pay for this work is too low. Because in the United States, as long as you are willing to study hard, you can do general skilled jobs, and the salary level of these jobs is much higher than that of being a child nanny, and if you want to keep the nanny, the higher salary is the general salary. Class families can't afford it, so it has caused a "nanny shortage" in American families. In this case, the influx of illegal immigrants from the US-Mexico border has naturally become the first choice of many American family nannies. . Because these illegal immigrants do not have legal work permits, they are willing to accept lower wages, and they are willing to work for a long time. Melia is one of them. This is supposed to be the best of both worlds for working families and illegal immigrants in the United States, but it's not justified legally. Because hiring illegal immigrants to work in the United States is also a felony, if you do not have a legal work permit, you are an illegal worker and are not protected by law. On the other hand, if you think that illegal workers have violated the rights and job opportunities of those legal workers, employers will be fined a high amount of money. Fines and prison terms of not less than 3 years, so the general service industry in the United States does not dare to hire illegal workers, but many Americans think that their home is not a work unit, and it is not illegal employment, so they are just waiting for immigration officials. With the acquiescence of one eye closed, more and more such illegal babysitters are born.
Many parents in China are afraid of what will happen to their children at home when they go out. They often lock the security door and let their children cry and cry. This is my personal experience. There is a young couple upstairs in my house at night. Likes the night life, bubble bars and cards with friends. His child is only 4 years old. Whenever they go out, they lock the child at home alone. The child is afraid of the dark at night, crying and making trouble, which makes me unable to calm down and read a book at night. To be honest, I think some parents in China are indeed a little irresponsible. These days are the "two sessions". Is it necessary for us to ask the deputies to enact a law "forbidding children under the age of 12 to be left alone"? Fa is much more constructive than the proposal of some representatives to let "PhD and Master wear Hanfu".
Some time ago, I was watching an American soap opera "Everybody Loves Raymond". There were often some slang jokes in it, which were not so funny in the eyes of Chinese people, but the old beauty on TV often laughed out loud for it. , to see others laugh like that, we have to smirk along. Similar to this situation, the sitcom "Wulin Biography", which was popular in the mainland not long ago, was introduced by Taiwan's Dongsen Satellite TV to be broadcast on Baodao's prime evening schedule. Forced to be ripped off halfway through. The audience in Taiwan complained that they couldn't understand it. Why is this? Princeton history professor Robert Darnton's book "The Great cat massacre" attempts to explain this cultural phenomenon when describing the massacre of cats on St. Severon Street, why a group of big men slaughtered weak animals and knocked on them Hit again, getting carried away with joy. What's so funny about this? Our inability to laugh shows the distance between us and pre-industrial European workers; our inability to laugh shows the difference in the cultural environment between us and Raymond; the audience in Taiwan cannot laugh, it shows that the After more than 50 years of estrangement between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, our original culture of the same origin is undergoing fission; we cannot understand the unreasonable details in "Babel", which shows our estrangement between the American judicial system and American society. Sensing the existence of that distance can serve as a starting point for a research effort, since anthropologists have found that the most opaque places seem to be the ideal entrances to penetrate a different culture. When you learn something that means something to the locals that you can't get into, whether it's a joke, a proverb, or a ritual, you're going to have to find somewhere to catch a set of never-before-seen things that you can easily solve. Meaning system. As Dr Darnton put it in his epilogue, "The most hopeful moments of our quest can be the most confusing. When we encounter something that seems unthinkable to us, we may be bumping into an unfamiliar mind. An effective entry point. Once we penetrate the local people's point of view, we should be able to travel in his symbolic world."
Understand this truth, everyone will laugh in the future, but don't smirk. Maybe behind that cold joke is our unknown world.
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