Vancouver recently had its summer fireworks. It is an occasion when the seawall gets packed with people. This is a great time to visit this lovely city, but these days do it only if you are prepared for a bit of humiliation…
Drinking alcohol is illegal in Vancouver, as it is in the most of North America. There is of course no logic behind this. Why should you not be able to drink in public when you can as easily drink inside the pub and even in the patio, and still walk out completely drunk? Although sometimes fun-killer, who wants unnecessary problems with the police!
A fundamental law of the social organisation is that any regulation, which invariably attracts sociopaths as enforcers, is like honey that attracts bees and will be abused and its meaning manipulated and extrapolated to allow the enforcer derive maximum pleasure with very minimal risks. And a fundamental law of the sociopath is that they derive pleasure from very base instincts (showing power over others, demeaning them, abusing the weak, etc.) and, despite the façade, they are so timid that if only a very miniscule population resisted them, they would go out of business.
If I remember it correctly, ten years earlier when I first went to the fireworks event in Vancouver, the most police did was ask anyone openly drinking in public to pour his drink in the drain. Mostly they turned a blind eye. They never checked bags. How could they? There was no law allowing them to do so. And some people would not have agreed to this checking. Could the police really arrest so many people? Or at the very least could they afford to waste their time? Whatever the police did, they did very politely. Most of the conduct of the police in Vancouver is still extremely polite and civil, but in very slight ways this is all changing, almost imperceptibly.
For the last two years, during the fireworks days, the police have been confiscating even capped bottles of drinks, if they think that you would later drink them in public. Two blocks from the alcohol store, I stood watching the drama being conducted by two policemen who looked like monkeys. Unlike normal Vancouver Police, these had potbellies. For sure they had been brought from outside Vancouver.
These (male) policemen were having a compete blast, something they had clearly been looking forward to for a year. They were launching themselves on people's bag without even the cursory civility of asking for their permission, going through their contents, without any racial or sexual discrimination. I wondered if their poking their hand in women's purses a sign of equality. They then confiscated drinks from those with closed bottles. For an hour that I stood there, not one person resisted being checked. Mostly they laughed it off. In jest, some even suggested to those monkey policemen to check for drinks in their wallets or asked if the police wanted to look at the smaller sections of the bag. It was like a party for everyone.
In a way, this was so much better than what would happen, in such situations in India, where police would take you to a corner – mostly not even that – give you a nice thrashing, empty your wallets and then if they were still dissatisfied and unrelieved, take you to a police station, for more beating while drinking your alcohol right in front of you. My friend here says he detests being abused in a "civil" way. If abused he must, he would rather be, the Indian way. I am not sure, if he would like that experience, but philosophically, he has a point.
Back to Vancouver… I wish only 1% of those going through what looked like humiliation to me from those monkey policemen had resisted, at least politely. None did. What I saw on the street was like a mating game. The police where learning and instilling in their worldviews what more they could get away with, adding to this learning every year, and then applying it with more force a year later, trying new limits of what is publicly acceptable. The public drowned in respect for authority is learning to give up an inch of liberty every-time, slowly, almost imperceptibly.
A frog thrown in hot water will instinctively jump out. A frog in cool water, which is being slowly heated will let himself boiled to death. When I first heard Doug Casey talking about the end of Western civilisation, I thought he was being just a bit too harsh to drive across his point. But, he couldn't be more right and accurate. All signs are that North American police will, within my lifetime, start to behave no different from those in India does. Unlike the frog, I must keep checking the water temperature. I must emigrate again when the time comes.
August 26, 2008
