Are we living in a civilization?

  Are we civilized?

We have advanced so far in the way of transportation, information sharing, and communication. Yet we still cannot settle our differences through communication.

In the past 100 years we have seen not only the invention of atomic weapons, but also, as a human race, have used them on each other. In August 1946, the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of people.
It still boils down to the biggest and the strongest. Prime examples would be the Firebombing of Dresden and the Massacre of Nanking. So I ask again, are we civilized?

Many times we may think that, "that’s not my time, it’s different now." Well, what of the Massacre of My Lai? Committed by regular, home grown, U.S. American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Or Tiananmen square in 1989? Or of the terrorist attacks of Sept.11? Or of the current civil unrest in Tibet and Thailand?

There is a saying “That if we do not learn from the mistakes of the past we are doomed to repeat them.” In my opinion, we as a human race are repeating them. In our country, we travel to the other side of the globe to invade other countries, spend billions of dollars, lose thousands of American lives, and thousands of Middle Eastern civilian casualties. Why do that while we have poverty right here in America? Starving people, families living in tent cities, poverty. Where is the good will toward men? At this, the so called "height of civilization"?

Some argue that only a minority of humans are living uncivilized, while the majority of humankind is living civilized. By this definition you could say that we are living in a civilization. Or is "civilization" based on the comforts that we have, such as T.V.’s, running water, electricity, etc?