Zombie Survival Plans and Our Declining Opinions of Each Other.

In the aftermath of another failed apocalypse and the current pop culture popularity of all things undead I have come to the conclusion that we do not quite like each other as one would hope. The Bad Catholic seemed to be thinking the same thing as I was around the same time because he recently posted on the same topic but a different perspective. I suggest reading his piece concerning Zombies and the end times. Don’t worry, I’ll wait here.

My thoughts towards the zombie apocalypse tend to focus on the same subject matter as what keeps me watching The Walking Dead: the people involved.

You can’t walk onto a high school or college campus without bumping into a male adolescent who has thought through every minute detail of his plan to survive the zombie hordes. (Never mind he still hasn't done his math homework.) I won’t lie I have several plans adaptable for various scenarios and climates. It was this realization that led me to my previously mentioned conclusion: we want to see each other as expendable when the going gets rough.

At the core of every zombie survival plan rests the not too often talked about truth: we would kill to survive and not just kill but kill the walking visage of our own friends and families. Sure they are just the reanimated corpses of our once loved ones but that is exactly what I want to drive at. Are we so willing to view our fellow man as fodder for our baseball bat/shotguns and chainsaw arms? I dare say it would not take long for us to lose our humanity in such a world. 

Ruminating further on the idea of zombie survival and the mental energy put into forming such plans leads me to wonder why we are so eager to view our world in such a way.  My theory: because it is easy.

It is far easier to think of ourselves when the fecal matter hits the rotating blades positioned to move air forward. I would say that those zombie plans are the result of our own existential laziness. Transcend the idea for a moment that we are not a solitary being but a part of some greater whole. How easy is it now to imagine the shambling horde comprised of our dearest friends? When a part of the whole is sick we are not called to turn from it and think only of ourselves. It is not the easy path to reach out to a broken part of the whole to fix it. 

As members of the Body of Christ we are called to view our brothers and sisters as just that, our brothers and sisters, we should not be so eager to imagine the shambling horde of expendable meat sacks ripe for bludgeoning, as obstacles to our survival. I seem to think that the best hope for survival in a zombie scenario would be selflessness. Sure that may be the death of us all but at least we would go out as humans with dignity, not just another lifeless face in a horde of selfishness.