"I don't know what's scarier, the fact that zombies could rise or the fact there are actually people out there that can't wait for it to happen."
- Max Brooks
I've been awaiting the zombie apocalypse for a while now. It'll sure beat a regular apocalypse, which from the movies I have seen will be likely be dull and monotonous.
If humanity truly is doomed, it seems that a zombie uprising is better suited to the unpredictability of life. Life is weird, right? Well, zombies are weird.
Other options for human annihilation are not. Nuclear Armageddon seems lame because we've been waiting for it for 65 years. The Bible's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seems embarrassingly outdated now that we've been desensitized to vampires deflowering teenagers and aliens destroying our most prized architectural achievements. Global warming is the weakest of the bunch. Weathe r did us in? Please. Humanity can do better than that.
If it's overpopulation and mass starvation, as some are postulating, then we have only the entire human population to blame for its over-stimulated libidos. With a worldwide zombie attack there will be only one person to blame, the daft biochemist who infects his lab assistant with an acne-preventing serum intended for rhesus monkeys but turns humans into narrow-minded flesh-eaters.
Which means that we'll all just be going about our business, pumping the gas, changing the diapers, eating the cheese or whatever, and one day we turn to the sound of some peculiar shuffling in the dining room and BRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGG here's the blood-and-sore-ravaged shell of your beloved using your arm as a beef skewer.
As for the survivors, the American logic of improving self worth through retail products and lip injections will be replaced with something far more visceral - slaughtering zombies! It will be a useful skill and the already-adept video game addicts will have a more productive avenue to direct their latent aggressions.
Yes, losing our friends and family to a legion of the walking dead will certainly be a bummer, but really at least we can get all of our grieving done at one time. And anyway, death by zombie seems like an excellent alternative to costly funeral arrangements.
This is no joke. This could really happen. ( Editor's note: this is all a joke. ) Popular culture has been preparing us for a large-scale zombie attack for over 40 years. A joint study by Carleton University and University of Ottawa found that an outbreak of the zombie virus "is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly." ( Editor's note: this part is not a joke .) We must be prepared.
All will not be lost and there will be some considerable benefits. All our current global dilemmas can be solved by a plague of flesh-eating zombies. Please consider: there will be almost three billion more mouths to feed on this planet by 2060. As the Third World develops its economic superiority, it will pump ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, dissolving what we in the West are half-assedly attempting to preserve. As countries continue to squabble, all those Pomade-enthusiasts in the 1950s will be proven correct - that nuclear war is imminent at any time . If this happens, we'll either perish immediately or inherit a planet void of bananas as we await our emphysemic fate under a sunless sky.
So, what better way to distract North and South Korea from their petulant squabbling? Zombies! Want to end starvation in the Third World? Watch impoverished zombies eat the impoverished living. World hunger: solved! Four-point-seven billion zombies will lack the motor skills to drive a car or operate a steel mill. Global warming: solved!
There are issues, of course, around the zombies adapting to their environments, like learning how to climb ladders or how to plan strategic offensive attacks, which according to George A. Romero are areas that the living have enjoyed the upper hand. But this is real life people! We must consider all the options for survival, like how to harvest grain in a world ravaged by monsters, or how to deal with the inevitable zombie-fetishists who will put our survivor camps in danger for their own twisted desires. It's a new world people!
Through this new phase of history, we will finally see humanity working together on a united front, confronting a terrifying legion of the walking dead, all in the name of a brighter tomorrow. Humanity can then rebuild itself. A group of people cooperating en masse for a common goal is, to me, the most beautiful thing life has to offer, and the repopulation of the human race seems like a righteous goal, indeed.
Of course, once society is rebuilt we'll likely revert back to the self-destructive behaviour that got us in this zombie-infested mess in the first place. But with any luck, it'll be a new version of self-destruction, which suits me fine because this current incarnation is getting tedious.
Zombies!
