An Impossible Measurement As Americans, we often grow up believing our country is the epitome of civilized nations, but we must look at the actual elements that make a society civilized or not. A civilized nation would be one that has sufficient technology. Technology that allows everyone in the country access to everyone else in the country and even people in other countries. A civilized nation has an efficient justice system. A specific branch of the government devoted to defending the innocent and locking up the guilty like the Unites States judicial branch. A civilized nation has not only a national government to handle foreign relations, but also local governments to understand what the people really want. A strong defense by well-supplied and trained armed forces is usually associated with civility. Most importantly, civilized nations are measured upon wealth. America has a Gross Domestic Product of 13.84 trillion dollars, while Africa has only 467.1 billion dollars. Africa has 24.3% unemployment rate and 50% of its population is under the poverty line, where the United States has only a 4.6% unemployment rate and only about 12% are under the poverty line. By these numbers, it would seem that America is much more civilized, but the United States also possesses a lot of characteristics of an uncivilized nation. Uncivilized nations are characterized by more unpleasant characteristics. Particularly genocide as in Germany during the time of WWII where thousands or innocent people were killed based on their religion. Many would characterize a communist country as uncivilized. The people have very little rights and government controlled lives. They are told exactly what to do for work and cannot earn more for doing a better job, and therefore have no incentive to do a better job. A corrupt nation is a primitive nation. Corruption in the government causes hardships for the people who then use corruptive measures to stay alive. Government officials that break...