Tuesday 19 May 2009

Civilization

A busy city, full of microcosmic blocks full of people interacting in the largest and smallest ways, inconceivable to a pedestrian walking the street outside.
Yet all these society’s verge in certain areas, pathways to the train station, migrations to the corner shop, the local tavern, the nearest Chinese restaurant.
Here these worlds collide with each other, making a larger society, a street,
a block, a shared address.
Outwards and onwards it goes, street companions join to form unions of the suburb, sharing bus routes and petrol stations. These all collide to make coalitions of the city with tribal sports teams wearing the same coloured armour and yelling unified war chants- taught to them by fathers, uncles and brothers….the male elders.
Every weekend battle is joined, with fierce foes taunting each other as spherical artillery is hurdle from one end of the battlefield to the other- sometimes to victory, sometimes to defeat, but always to a conclusion that half will complain wasn’t fair....
In the upper tiers smile the influential, some with pendants of office or industry, others with flash vehicles and flashier suits. These are the ones who control the destiny of those below, yet they too belong to a greater union, one that brings all the feuding fiefdoms into a whole, into something greater than a city, a street, a block or an individual. Giving the gathered a sense of purpose, a largeness of scale that over time seems to shrink as the many, the vast hordes that occupy every corner, are sown into the one. A single face presented to the outsider as a whole, through union is strength, through strength there is unity, through unity there is peace. Peace in the streets and peace in the mind. A congress of wills!
Be it a troop of apes on the savannah facing their rivals or the largest city on the planet looking hungrily at its neighbour, civilization is part of us all…
…which makes it all the more important for us to be civilized.
Don’t you think?