On Civilization

On Civilization

The foundation of our lives we call civilization. But what is civilization for you? We talk so much about it that it reaches us as if something shapeless, an "alien thing" yet undefined.

Many enjoy the benefits of this quality we call civilization. Those are the "lucky" ones. Still, we also know that several million people don't have access to anything related to the concept of civilization, or just to some, like some people in some countries may have access to cell phones and other technology but not to potable drinkable water or sewers. Yes, they may have television in every home, but most children go to bed with an empty stomach. Access to a better lifestyle, health, medicine and hospitals is, for a significant part of the world's population, a foreign thing that others in a foreign country enjoy and that they, the locals, enjoy through screens. In most countries, the inhabitants don't even have access to the minimum to survive, but their government's primary spending is weapons. That's what we are. Aren't we? Inequality is a crime, and we have built civilization after civilization upon it. It's in our human nature. What have we learned as this world's "most advanced species"? Nothing. We have learned nothing since the basics. Seeing each other as members of the same species, sharing wealth, and living in peace and harmony is still an impossible dream among humans. And there is no doubt that in man's dream to conquer other planets, we will carry "our idea of civilization" with us, and that one way or the other, we will impose our ways on those alien minds, still so far away from our hands, but to the reach of our dreams.

Civilization should be a collective work that promotes humanity to higher stages. Instead, it is a continuum of crimes committed by man, not only against man but against the entire Earth, and introduced by historians to the next generations in acceptable forms and throughout the centuries.