Civilization.

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What is it, exactly?  There are many answers to that.  A few of them are more correct, more inclusive, but none of them will get it all right.  Further, by the time you near the perfection of the definition, you have run clean out of listeners, readers, thought, and reason itself.  Basically, however, think of civilization as that which lessens the reliance on brutality to live.  It is a spectrum, from primitive to nearly effortless living.

Oddly, both ends of the spectrum are horrors.  When people have to fight everything, and everyone, to survive, only the animal might remain.  If people have to fight nothing, and no one, and are prevented from competition, there is no challenge to life, something people seem breed to not only tolerate, but need.  Mix in that some people are not capable of one, or the other, extreme, and yet still others are well adapted to cope with either, both, or a mix, and you realize there will never be an equal outcome.  It isn't possible.

That isn't the point.  The point is, the civilization myself and my fellow Americans know is, without a doubt, the pinnacle of all the efforts at civilization in man's history to date.  People can travel around the world in, really, a day.  With the right equipment and tools, I could pretty much dig the volume of a swimming pool in a day, or move millions of tons of material from a ship to shore in a day.  We can point a metal object at game, and take it.  But, because others herd, tend, and breed domestic animals, there really isn't a need.  It is actually more expensive to hunt one's own game, of some unsure quality and without the needed fats, than it is to pay for a whole animal raised by another, butchered by another, and sometimes delivered.

We can call anyone with a phone, anywhere in the world.  We live long and healthy lives.  We have so much excesses of both energy and leisure time that we, if we choose, may play sports just for pleasure... and to burn excess calories and that extra energy that can plague us.  Food, just that alone, is miraculous.  At absolutely any time in history, and even to this day in most parts of the world, if you suggested that people actually seek out physical activity because food is so easy to come by that we live in a nation plagued by obesity, the listener might smack you for anger of loved ones who starved to death, or disbelieve you, or have no idea what to do.  The apex of anything is doing something so simply that no collective energy is spent to do the act.  We, here, now, are apex predators beyond the ken of anything that has, or ever will, exist.

All of this, however, is based on a few simple things.  Energy to burn, which goes into tech, which has replaced the sweat off our brow.  You work hard?  You do?  Really?  Give up your vehicle, turn off your furnace, stop the water flow to your home, NOW go to work.  Just do it for a week.  That isn't even the whole of it, but it would give you an idea of what real work begins to look like, the work of surviving.  We don't do that, on top of our jobs.  No, you don't work hard.

Beside energy, and the means of dispersing it, there are all sorts of mechanisms.  Electrical, of course, mechanical no doubt, but ideal as well.  Planes can fly, with some givens, but without the notion of air traffic control, those flights would perpetually be endangered.  Simple ideas which are used to make all of the rest of it work.  Little of that has strict borders, either.  What goes into flight control also, for example, puts limits on what others can use for broadcasting and communicating, what can be flashed toward the sky, and it webs out from there.  Our world, as Americans, is far more ideal, if based on humble simple devices, and machines, than it it on those last.

That said, the greater the civilization, the more fragile it really is.  A simple thing, such as bringing down the electrical grid, would be enough to end our civilization if that could not be repaired.  And, honestly, it couldn't be.  If even a third of the equipment that runs our grid were to be destroyed, the cost and complexity involved with repairing that system would see our grand children's grand children still working on the project.  But this isn't about even that.  It is simply that we do live in a fragile land of magic.  Magic held in by mirrors.  Mirrors made of glass.

Of course, for those who see, know... it isn't even about fear, or ignoring the issue, or even the issue itself.  It is about understanding some humble truths.  Enjoying the fruits of the labor of the generations who formed the political grounds, leaving space for the private sector and government to work toward implementing, as imperfectly and haltingly as is the best that men can do, a world in which we can complain about a... slow internet link.  Just... saying.