So what is it with zombies? Why the fascination? From movies to books our culture is fascinated with zombies.

Pretend zombie.

From the standpoint of story I don’t see the appeal. Outside of mowing down and gruesomely killing lots of people whether zombified or not, there’s nothing there. No plot. No tension. Nothing to be learned. Nothing of artistic value – whatever that means. Just carnage. So perhaps the draw is the idea that it could actually happen; that some virus or pathogen could infect humans and result in the Zombie Apocalypse. I guess kids like that sort of thing. Heck, when I was young I thought surviving in the aftermath of a nuclear war sounded exciting. I know better now. I know better because we are in the beginning of the Zombie Apocalypse and it isn’t going to be fun.

What is a Zombie Apocalypse? The standard Zombie Apocalypse – ZA for short – occurs when most people become infected with some pathogen that turns them into a zombie. Generally just a few (well-armed) uninfected people remain to fight against the hoards. Originally zombies were slow moving but as audiences have become ever more jaded on death and destruction their attention span has waned so directors had to speed the zombies up. Now they are faster than Usain Bolt.

Pretend zombie.

Other than being fast, zombies haven’t changed much over the last few movie-going generations. I guess the hallmark of a zombie is that it is a reanimated dead body – but that’s really just a gimmick to explain their actions. Zombies are defined by what they do regardless of whether they are reanimated by a Voodoo priest, infected by a virus, or inhabited by spores from outer space. Zombies kill (healthy) people, eat their brains, and infect others. The ultimate end of the ZA is the extinction of humans to be replaced by this brutish, violent creatures from which all humanity has been stripped. And that’s why I maintain that we are at the beginning of a ZA. The only thing that is different from say, World War Z and the USA is the speed of infection.

Real zombie.

Modern culture claims to be centered around tolerance but that’s a lie and everyone knows it. What it is really centered around is “gettin’ off.” Pleasure. From sex, to drugs, to hedonism, our movies, books, past times, and even our laws have come to reflect this. Despite life-altering damage ranging from unwed pregnancy to lingering attachment to life-threatening disease, kids and adults have been encouraged to participate in unregulated sex because it feels good. Despite the health risks of drugs and alcohol and the obvious damage to neural abilities, drug use by kids and adults is on the rise. Oh, and it is still a Federal and State crime in most places. Despite obvious deleterious emotional effects including PTSD, ADD and other disorders, kids and adults regularly observe ritual slaughter of fellow humans for entertainment. Anyone who claims these activities have no negative effects is engaged in and addicted to them. In fact, the first thing a budding drug user “realizes” is that drugs have no health risks! Just ask a 17 year-old pot smoker.

Real zombie.

Real zombie

Ultimately you wind up with what is emerging in the Unites States and the West in general: people who contribute little or nothing to society yet use every available resource to recruit others and consume their brains. Isn’t this where a lifestyle of gettin’ off leads? How is this different than a zombie? In fact, it is worse. Zombies, like ebola, tend to burn out quickly. The truly dangerous diseases are the ones that take a while to manifest like AIDS and tuberculosis. Before you even know you’re sick you’ve infected hundreds. And now zombies are passing laws that make it easier to make more zombies.

Think this is a ridiculous premise? One of these pics is from a ZA video game. The other is from a US city and is not the result of a natural disaster. Can you tell which is the real one?

Real ZA

Still unconvinced? Left unchecked a real ZA does have an exponential phase that looks pretty much like a movie ZA. How do I know this? Because it has happened before. The Sack of Rome. The Rape of Nanking. Nazi Germany. Communist Russia. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Khmer Rouge. The French Revolution. Look at any of these events – and these are just a tiny sampling of all that are there – and you will see that they were all preceded by a collapse of cultural values like the collapse we are experiencing right now, followed by the passage of laws that hasten the fragmentation of society, just like the ones being passed right now. And just in case you’re  confused, World War II wasn’t fun or desirable for the winners or the losers. Living in Soviet Russia sucked, unless you were a zombie in which case you didn’t realize it sucked because you had no brain.

Fortunately, just as there are differences in the onset of a real ZA and the pretend kind, there are also differences in how it can be stopped. Here’s a hint: unlike in a pretend ZA were you can be infected against your will, in a real ZA you have a choice, and that will be the subject of part two of this series: Beating the Zombie Apocalypse.