Life In Japan: Police Power II

Let’s face it. Crime is universal. Wherever you find human beings, you’ll find individuals in violation of the carefully-crafted laws of the land. Why just this week here in Japan, a lady in Kyoto walked out of a pet store with a cat. Granted, it was not a heist on the scale of the Great Train Robbery. In fact, the lady was convinced the cat was actually her cat, one that had recently run away. A case of mistaken cat identity? Covid-19 derangement syndrome?

But no matter how you look at it, policing is a tough job.

So . . . while police in the U.S. are killing fellow citizens, and especially people of color are being terminated by the law enforcement officers who are supposed to protect them, what are the police here in Japan doing?

The story pictured at the head of this article is a perfect example. Are they stopping waves of armed terrorists? Are they cracking down on drug traffickers and drug addicts who in need of their next fix are snatching purses from helpless old ladies? Are they interdicting elicit trade in contraband which could send the Japanese economy into a death spiral?

Actually, these officers are putting a notification on a bicycle! The owner of this bike — brace yourself — failed to lock it, a clear invitation for a hardened bicycle thief to cart it off and then God only knows. Ride it? Sell it? Ship it to North Korea as a gift to Kim Jong-un? The paper band around the tire is a reminder that it’s a good idea to lock a bike.

Of course, the world is in great turmoil right now. The coronavirus pandemic has everyone on edge. In the U.S. people understandably let off steam by burning down police stations, as a message to authorities that they should do a better job, even though now they don’t have a proper place to organize their police work.

By contrast, here in my charming home town of Tambasasayama, the police embrace a slightly different narrative. Since things that grow can offer both calm and beauty, they now have 40 flowering plants in the lobby of the main police station. Not surprisingly, people like this and some just stop by for no other reason than to enjoy the display of flora. No one has been seen outside the building with a torch and a trunk full of Molotov cocktails.

I guess some cynics would characterize this as police power merging with flower power. Or the cops trying to put an amicable face on the often unpredictable and brutal business of enforcing the law and keeping the peace. Whatever the reason, we have to recognize the harsh realities.

It’s easy for crime to take hold, spread, and run roughshod over a society. It’s important to draw the line, never make excuses or compromise.

Take jaywalking. Everyone knows that jaywalking is a “gateway crime”. Statistically, every person who has murdered, robbed, raped, dealt drugs, pimped, cheated on their taxes, or thrown someone off the top floor of a skyscraper, has jaywalked. In the minds of tough law enforcers, this is proof that jaywalking, if unchecked, leads to truly reprehensible and villainous behavior.

Thus, in the U.S. the police take a rigid stance on jaywalking. If you’re too lazy to walk the extra few steps to find a proper pedestrian crosswalk, it can end badly.

Hmm . . . I’m not sure why I brought this up.

Oh, I remember!

You see, the Japanese don’t jaywalk or cross against a signal. They dutifully seek out an official crosswalk, and even if there is absolutely no traffic in sight for several kilometers, they wait until the walk sign goes on before proceeding. Which is why there’s practically no crime here. No jaywalking. No murder or burglary, kidnapping or gang banging. Or very little. This strict regard for jaywalking law is, of course, reinforced by an abiding respect for the lives and property of others, as I’ve written about elsewhere.

Let me close this by referencing a video of the Japanese police in action here. This was a difficult “traffic management” situation which in my opinion they handled admirably.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]





Life In Japan: Police Power II

Take it to the streets!

March on the capitol!

March in front of the White House!

Everyone loves a good rally or demonstration.

It's exciting.  Sometimes we even get to see heads busted!

Yep!  Nothing like a whole bunch of people waving hand-drawn signs.

Except these days . . . no one notices.

It used to be the way the "voice" or the "concern" or even the "rage" of the masses could be heard.  We could make those folks at the top of the power pyramid listen to us . . . or else!  Rallies with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of chanting, marching, yelling, fired up protestors appeared to portend big changes, or at least the potential for them.  These public events -- some massive like the Million Man March in Washington DC on October 16, 1995 -- represented "people power" and grass-roots democracy in its rawest, perhaps most effective, form.  Or so we believed at the time.

Modern mythology would have it that it was the campus protests of the late 60s and early 70s that stopped the Vietnam War.  That feminists burning their bras ushered in the era of equal rights for women.  That the Civil Rights marches beginning with Martin Luther King Jr. leading historic protest marches in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama created critical momentum for historic changes in civil rights laws and an end to persecution of African-Americans.  Even going back to the 30s, we credit demonstrations coupled with various other forms of political and personal activism, with monumental breakthroughs in the improvement of wages, job security and working conditions.

How important these highly visible street demonstrations were to ultimately changing the landscape of America is debatable.

The durability of their effects is not.  Everything went forward, then went in reverse.

Yes, things changed.  There were positive developments which came out of street protests.

But look at the state of things now!

The labor union movement has been all but destroyed.  Wages have been stagnant now for decades.  Union membership is pathetically low.  Worker benefits are being slashed.  Job security is measured in weeks, not years.

Yes, we're out of Vietnam but we're currently engaged in six other wars, have spread our military footprint to 147 nations with over 900 bases, have specials operations and proxy fighters in Africa, Asia, South America -- everywhere! -- doing under the cloak of secrecy whatever these "invisible" fighters do on behalf of the empire builders, using incidentally your tax dollars to wreak havoc across the globe and increase the threat of terrorism.

The assault on women's rights is a 360º affair, with the juggernaut against choice ramping up, the struggle for equal pay going down the same road as the struggle for livable wages, a President-elect who is more known for articulating the advantages of pussy-grabbing than anything resembling coherent policies, females more and more rendered as sex objects in every form of media and entertainment.  Patriarchy is healthily ensconced in the agencies of government and the power centers of crony capitalism.

Set-backs in eliminating racism are prominent on many fronts these days.  Muslims are openly vilified, blacks marginalized, refugees of all shades of brown bartered as political pawns.  Racist slurs, vulgar stereotypes, xenophobic tirades, ultra-nationalistic and even White supremacist memes appear regularly with less salient blow back than we've seen in sixty years.  With our first African-American president we witnessed the fortunes of the African-American community go backwards.  Obama promised early in his presidency to have an adult conversation on race.  He apparently forgot.  Now we have an openly racist incoming administration, a frightening assembly of socially conservative autocrats, which promises to further divide and polarize a frustrated and angry citizenry.

All of these longstanding challenges and crises certainly were well-represented and each had in some forgotten past their 15 minutes of fame and expression in well-organized and highly visible street protests.  Even more recently, we witnessed the promise of the same in the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter marches.

But let's bravely confront some new realities and draw some honest conclusions. 

Apparently, even the best attempts at facilitating reform by mass demonstrations might in the short run be effective, but whatever good comes of it will through steady attrition and relentless pressure by the rich and powerful eventually be undone, often leaving us worse off than when we started.

Look at our democracy.  Well . . . you can't look at our democracy.  It doesn't exist now.  This is our reward for attempting election cycle after election cycle to make adjustments and incremental improvements in the mechanisms of our electoral process.  We used the accepted, official, approved channels to try to make voter registration more efficient and accessible, make ballot counting more transparent and free of error, allegedly make real choice at the polls pervasive.  What we have is a rigged system where literally millions of citizens are denied their constitutional right to vote, electronic voting machines can be programmed to switch votes and leave no paper trail, and the two major parties taking turns gerrymandering any representative verisimilitude out of our local districts.  

As a result, at least for now, our representative democracy is a representative sham.

What can we do?  Protest?  March on our state capitals and Washington DC?

The evidence is unambiguous.  It has recently become obvious that street demonstrations are pretty much a non-starter.  Any attempts at public assembly are so curtailed by police control, protestors are catalogued for future harassment, many are arrested and booked for no better reason than just being there, attempts to document police malfeasance and excessive brutality illegally but no less finally crushed.

Point in case:  Once the "establishment" realized that Occupy Wall Street was gaining serious momentum, it was just a matter of a couple weeks before it was completely taken apart.  The movement was infiltrated by the FBI and local undercover officers, all sorts of new health and safety regulations suddenly popped up, the protesters were intimidated, cleared out, and/or arrested.  This was coordinated from the top and took place nationally in a remarkably well-organized, perfectly-orchestrated eradication of the movement.

The suppression of free speech -- the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of expression and dissent -- has been assured by corporate and state control of the media. "Perception management" is the new tool of choice -- which is just a euphemism for creating official narratives which bear no relation to actual events but serve the purposes of the ruling class.  The latest assault has taken the form of a neo-McCarthyism, the heavy-handed maligning of dissenting views as fake news and smearing non-establishment journalists and protestors as anti-American thugs, just tools and agents of foreign governments.

The predictable result is that when people get out in the streets to make their voices heard, either they get no media coverage, or they are vilified as anti-patriotic, stray members of a lunatic fringe, or threats to national security.

Even one of the self-identified founders of Occupy Wall Street, Micah White, in a recent interview characterized the use of mass demonstrations as now being largely ineffective.

So what can we do?

Let me propose something which on the surface sounds ludicrous but I believe holds the key to our success.

We need to hide in plain sight!

No, I'm not joking.  In future articles, I'll explain in detail exactly what I mean.  For now, here's a preview of what I'm suggesting . . .

The corporate state now keeps us in check by perpetuating two illusions:  1) We are free, even encouraged to offer input into the system through a number of established channels; and 2) we ultimately express our will and affect the direction of the country by voting.

Thus, we can organize petitions because the powers will just ignore them.

We can conduct opinion polls because they can just discredit and ignore them.

We can organize community groups because that will keep us busy and distracted.

We can vote because ultimately the elite intend to install their own puppets anyway.

Fine!  If in order to prevent an insurrection and real revolution, the rich and powerful wish to continue promoting the myths that we are self-governing, that we have a voice, that our votes count, I say we call their bluff.  They can't complain if we're just being good citizens.  They can't attack us if we appear to be following the rules.

We work within the official channels because . . .

I believe that all of these approved mechanisms can be used to organize the vast majority of Americans into an enormous voting bloc.  We have much more uniting us than dividing us.  But currently we do not control either the conversation, the narrative, or the agenda.  I believe that if we take control of the conversation and narrative, then create -- or 'discover' might be the operating term -- an agenda which aligns with our priorities and needs, not that of the rich and powerful ruling elite, we can mount a soft revolution in this country.

We can do this in plain sight, apparently just being good, obedient citizens.

This will require some creative thinking, thorough planning, and rigorous discipline.

We will definitely need to think way outside the box.  But trust me . . . it can be done!

What we've been doing thus far, street demonstrations being now high on the list, is not working.  

Time for fresh thinking, exciting new tactics, innovative new strategies.

---

For a preview of where I'm heading with this:

Fighting for the Democracy We Deserve was published in September 2015 and also is available both in every popular ebook format and as a deluxe paperback . . .

 
Amazon (Kindle) . . . amzn.to/1VMf2Ft
Amazon (Print) . . . amzn.to/1L9SdIC
Apple (iTunes) . . . apple.co/1JD1YAg
Barnes & Noble . . . bit.ly/1ZUJUpn
Kobo (Indigo) . . . bit.ly/1IX6rO4
Smashwords . . . bit.ly/22PXWLf
Direct from printer . . . bit.ly/1i7ISFM


The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World is now available both as an ebook and deluxe paperback at many of the usual outlets . . .

  
Amazon (Kindle) / US . . . amzn.to/2cpIRfQ
Amazon (Print) / US . . . amzn.to/2cEhnCb
Amazon (Kindle) / UK . . . amzn.to/2cKXFsV
Amazon (Kindle) / Canada . . . amzn.to/2ciZKdl
Amazon (Kindle) / Japan . . . amzn.to/2cbf3TO
Barnes & Noble . . . bit.ly/2cWxvzd
Kobo (Indigo) . . . bit.ly/2cI8cB6
Apple iTunes . . . apple.co/2cqw7an
Smashwords . . . bit.ly/2cb6Cse
Direct from printer . . . bit.ly/2c3mJsl



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Take it to the streets!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkyRe18ICeA

Success Story! Black Man Beats The Odds

With the nation so divided along the lines of both class and race, driven to the streets to protest the election to the presidency of a rancorous bigot and self-serving sociopath, it's heartening to see any African-American rise up over the historically endemic racism which used to have him hanging at the end of a rope, and even now conspires to keep most of his brothers and sisters in both physical and psychological gulags. 

The phrase 'systemic racism' was at least uttered once in passing -- that I know of -- by the white patriarchy's candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, during the presidential campaign.  This was heralded as a real breakthrough in our national conversation about race. I guess that means that by today's standards, Hillary Clinton now sits next to Rosa Parks in the tortured struggle for human rights.

Even with the bar set so low, we are prompted seek out sources of inspiration and hope.  As luck would have it, we have one such success story right at our fingertips!

Just look at these photos of the opulent $5.3 million mansion President Obama will move his family into after Donald Trump takes the oath of office.




Granted, not every African-American was so favored during Obama's presidency.

Some of those left out of this historic uptick in the fortunes of our very first black president included Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.  They were among thousands of blacks -- mostly males and often unarmed -- gunned downed by police across America during Obama's reign.

And the people over at Black Lives Matter still seem to be having some sort of hissy fit!  You'd think they could just put aside whatever is bothering them and vicariously enjoy the new digs Barak, Michelle, and the kids will be moving into in January.  Not to mention the million-dollar book deals, the courtesy vacation junkets all over the globe, and of course, the $200,000 speaking fees that the ex-Prez can expect to pull in, to keep the family outfitted in Autographed Nike Air Jordans.

Then you have Jeffrey Sterling, the whistleblower who was prosecuted on dubious grounds for testifying to Congress, then allegedly providing classified material to journalist James Risen about a dicey covert CIA operation gone awry.  Apparently now federal jailers are trying to kill him by depriving him of much-needed medical care.

The 23% of African Americans who still live below the official poverty line didn't do so well either.  Plus it appears the gravy train just sped right on by the 20% of black folks who are still unemployed, despite putting their best foot forward in an effort to take advantage of the widely touted economic recovery from the 2008 crash, which trashed their savings, and put many of them out on the street to live among the rats.

Jeez, Louise!

Can't all these folks stop grousing and just bask in some black dude trickle-down success?

What's wrong with everyone?



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Success Story! Black Man Beats The Odds