Probably not a question you have thought much about. "What Makes Us Civilized?" I certainly had not thought about it at all prior to joining the Yukon City Council on May 14, 2024.
And yet, as a perpetual student of history, I had the groundwork laid to take a stab at this critical question. I have distilled it into the basics:
- You have an expectation of safety in your own home, your neighborhood, and the whole city.
- If your life is endangered due to a fire or health emergency, there are services available to respond to you in a reasonable timeframe.
- Your toilet flushes when the depressor is activated.
- Your faucet runs with clean and safe drinking water.
- You are able to achieve reasonable transport and freedom of movement.
If any one of these basic elements breaks down, civilization begins to break down. These are not luxuries in our modern era within moderate density towns or cities—they are the invisible threads that hold together our daily lives in close proximity.
Take, for instance, a neighborhood near where my family and I sometimes visit in Ciénaga, Colombia. On the surface, it has many of the same elements we do—streets, schools, shops. But history weighs heavily there.
In the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta—where families live in stilt-house villages and fish the lagoons—violence crashed into everyday life. Armed gangs tied to the drug trade and territorial control entered these amphibious towns, kidnapping and murdering fishermen and their neighbors. On November 22, 2000, they raided Nueva Venecia and surrounding hamlets, executing dozens and forcing a mass displacement that scarred the community for years. Earlier that same year, gunmen killed 13 fishermen near Trojas de Cataca. These were not random crimes; they were part of Colombia's armed conflict, intertwined with organized crime and narcotrafficking.
Carlos Vives's masterful song Cumbiana points to that reality. The song and its video were filmed in those water towns and intercut with the lives of the "pueblos anfibios," intentionally stitching memory and resilience to a place still haunted by the massacre.
Today, those bright houses on stilts are more than postcards; they're proof of survival. I hope you can visit them one day—I would be happy to take you there. Families still row handmade canoes along channels where loved ones were taken, children still learn to paddle before they can walk and the civilization endures.
Civilization broke down on those terrible days in 2000. Fortunately the community is resilient and has rebuilt but we must remind ourselves how much our expectation of safety and security in our community contributes to civilized society.
We all expect safety and security in our town and we are blessed with a strong police department and other public safety agencies that keep us safe.