"Civilization"

Civilization is a band aid over the sore of humanity. Sometimes it's nice to live in a society, what with its rituals and "culture" and other odd little things that help people live with one another without fighting or otherwise deliberately doing things that are hazardous to the health and well-being of others.

Yet civilization seems like little more than a veneer that hides the brutal nature of humanity, and does little to nothing to change it. We've got the wars and crimes and drugs and other social ills that are hardly affected by civilization. In fact, there is little civilized about the "civilized" peoples, given that even the "barbarians" of old had their own cultural perks. Of course, civilized peoples are simply the ones who're most capable of rampaging over someone's front lawn and then looting the roses from their gardens. You've got to be a barbarian to let that happen. Or you're a barbarian because it happened, because your front lawn no longer has roses. Tsk.

Sometimes it really takes the truly inhumane to rear their ugly heads before people will take note of just how sick people can really get. Yes, these are, of course, perfectly "civilized". Civilization is a nice term that seems to immunize a people from the foul acts of burning, looting and massacres. After all, that's what we prefer to call...war. Anyone who does something similar on a small scale without official sanction? Why...they're criminals.