Through different stages of my life, I’ve always been haunted by certain temporal terrors. From death by fire after a particularly gruesome PSA when I was in the fifth grade to being mauled by wolves after one too many viewings of Peter and the Wolf at the tender age of six, there’s always been plenty of fodder for my nightmares. In recent months, a quick succession of scary movies, The Walking Dead, and the trailer for World War Z, and in general the preponderance of zombies in pop culture have been the focus of my neurotic fears.
There isn’t anything about zombies that isn’t terrifying. They combine the cross-cultural taboo of cannibalism with the universal fear of death and disease, resulting in a lurching subhuman wretch that never, ever stops following you around and trying to eat your brains.
The worst part though, is that no one is safe. Brains are brains no matter your race, socioeconomic status, or sexuality. If you aren’t having your brain cells munched on by an undead corpse, then you’re constantly at risk of becoming a zombie yourself. Suffice it to say, I’m petrified. And I think we are woefully unprepared for the inevitable onset of the zombie apocalypse.
Now, I’m not saying we should all ponder the best weapon with which we should arm ourselves in order to wreak maximum levels of zombie carnage. (The obvious choice is a baseball bat or battle-axe, if you cared to know, since they don’t need ammo.) What I’m saying is that as a society we should really think about what to do in the case of a pandemic of the zombie virus, the likes of which we have never seen before.
A disease like the zombie virus strains our fervent belief in the triumphs of modern medicine, but so do many diseases that we still fight every day. Malaria kills thousands, one out of every three people on this planet is currently infected with tuberculosis, and don’t even get me started on drug-resistant strains of deadly bacteria floating around in hospitals. We are all so convinced of our ability to fight and beat any disease the sick and twisted mind of Mother Nature can throw at us, that we’re blind to just how mistaken that belief is.
As comfortable as we are with our 21st century medicine, we need to face facts. If we are confronted with a disease for which we have no effective cure, our multi-billion dollar healthcare machine will not be able to do anything. In my imagination, people will turn into zombies. In real life, they will die.
If you doubt this, just look to HIV/AIDS. There is still no cure, decades after its emergence, and preventive measures to stop the progression to AIDS are the most we can currently do. As children of the ‘90s, we missed out on the paralyzing fear that spread across the world in the mid-‘80s about the AIDS epidemic. We don’t know what a disease can do to fracture society, other than what we’ve seen in Contagion or The Walking Dead. We don’t know the primal fears that can take over in pandemics, when no one is safe from infection and there is no known cure.
As healthy 20-somethings, the most there is to worry about are sniffles or maybe getting mono from that sketchy DFMO at that one party. But we all need to get real-there’s worse shit out there than mono. By believing in the infallibility of modern medicine, or the strength of civilizing forces in the face of imminent death, we’re setting ourselves up to be the guy that always gets left behind and eaten by the zombies.
I’d like to think that, subconsciously, the world has started to come around to the idea that there are microscopic organisms lurking around just a mutation away from killing everyone ever. It’s the only logical reason I can come up with for why we are so fascinated with zombies. Even the Center for Disease Control jumped on the bandwagon, and released a report last year detailing what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. Do you know what else the CDC deals with? Pandemics.
Maybe, then, this omnipresence of zombies in pop culture will do some good. Someone, somewhere, must realize that it’s about damn time to stop focusing on who slept with which ex-general, or whether J-Biebs and Selena actually broke up or not, and put the time, effort, and money toward figuring out and dealing with deadly diseases. Since there’s only the fate of the human race in the balance, I think readjusting our priorities should be at the top of our lists.
But until we get our heads out of our collective asses about disease prevention, I’ll be keeping my zombie-destroying baseball bat under my bed, thank you very much.
i hate zombies! <3 eric