Get Civilized, Bro

Recently, I was watching a British panel show called Mock the Week, when I heard a comment made by one of the regular comedians. He just made a passing joke about American history by pointing out that “(England) had civilized government before (America) was discovered.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m usually game for a bit of American bashing. Only because it’s fun to laugh at someone who doesn’t generally laugh at themselves, which I know is a stereotype. But let’s face it, every stereotype is always a little bit true.

What I took offense with was the claim that America hadn’t ‘been discovered.’ Which is a ridiculous claim to make, considering that it definitely had been discovered by American Indians around 9, 000 – 10, 000 BC.

I have always been a little bit shocked by this discovery that British people and people here in Australia believe that cultures that existed before white people came and ‘destroyed the joint’ – to put it in Twitter terms, ‘don’t really count’ as far as civilization goes.

Now, I’ve seen pretty bad racism. I grew up in Queensland, for Christ’s sake. But this kind of racism is the worst kind there is. It’s the scary, leaping out at you from an alleyway kind of racism.

I studied Aboriginal customs and traditions in school (like most of us) and uni, and I’ve got to say, the first thing I thought wasn’t: ‘wow, these guys seem really backwards.’

Nope, the first thing I thought was: ‘this is really complex and detailed. Wow, Aboriginal society throughout history was amazingly large and structured.’

I haven’t studied American Indian society, but from what I understand they lived off the land very much like Aborigines and had established agricultural and medical ways of doing things thousands of years before England had even hit the dark ages.

The moral of this rant is: being different isn’t necessarily being less advanced and it’s time we threw out the tired and racist stigma associated with the word ‘civilized.’

So, much of this mentality reeks of the inner workings of an insecure 16^th century Englishman struggling with existential bullshit.