#title Civilization #author Ernest Crosby #SORTauthors Ernest Crosby; #date 1997 #source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/350-fall-1997/civilization]] #lang en #pubdate 2016-02-18 #notes Fifth Estate #350, Fall, 1997 Do you think it will go on forever? The foul city spreading its ugly suburbs like an ink-blot over the fresh green woods and meadows, Its buildings climbing up to ten, twenty, thirty shapeless stories, Its lurid smoke smothering the blue sky; The mad rushing hither and thither, by steam and electricity, as of insects on a stagnant pool, ever faster and faster; Forests falling in a day to fill the world with waste paper; Presses turning out aimless books and magazines and newspapers by the ton; Factory chimneys poisoning the west wind with unnamed stenches; Dark pollution from chemical works and sewers sucking up the limpid purity of our streams; Squalid brick-yards eating like leprosy into the banks of the river; Coal-mines belching forth black vomit over whole counties; The endless labor of digging gold and silver out of their natural deposits under the distant mountain and heaping them up in unnatural and equally useless deposits under our sidewalks; The raging whir of machinery forever whirling its tasteless, shoddy, adulterated products into the laps of the idle; Stalwart country folk, lured into overcrowded slums, to be bleached and stifled and enervated in the slavery of dull toil; The army of tramps and unemployed swelling, suicides multiplying, starvation widening in the wake of steam yachts and auto-cars of multi-millionaires; Prisons, poorhouses, insane asylums, hospitals, and armories growing bigger and bigger; And yet in all this wild, material maelstrom scarcely a glimmer of art or beauty or dignity or repose or self-respect— Do you think it can go on forever? Do you think it ought to go on forever? —Ernest Crosby (1856–1907)