Zombies everywhere! Quit it!
See if you can name the movie: A lone person, let’s call him Steve, wakes up from a good night’s sleep. His house is empty so he assumes his family is out on a Saturday morning. As he goes through his morning routine, he doesn’t seem to notice that outside his home things seem a bit…off. It’s only when he retrieves the newspaper that he realizes: the world has gone to hell. Zombies are roaming the streets. He flees back into his house and sees his wife. She turns around and attacks him. Yep, she’s a zombie. He fends her off then flees the house with the only weapon he could find. He jumps in his car and speeds off but wrecks it shortly thereafter. He’s rescued from the wreck by a ragtag and ethnically diverse band of survivors. They make their way through the city to a “safe zone”, getting picked off one by one. One of the survivors gets bitten by a zombie in one of the attacks but hides it from the group. Later, he turns at the worst possible moment. In the end, Steve sacrifices himself so that the lady of the group can make it to safety. As the credits roll, the question remains: how will the world continue?
Ok name the movie…YOU CAN’T! Why? Because it’s pretty much every freaking zombie movie ever made. This zombie thing? It’s getting old. For some reason, it’s impossible to go anywhere without seeing zombie stuff. The firearm and “Doomsday Prepper” crowds have really latched on to zombies like…uhm…a zombie munching on brains.
So why has this zombie thing become so popular in the firearms world? George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead, originally used zombies as social commentary. These days they’ve become a metaphor for disaster preparedness.
The zombie plague always seems to happen overnight. It’s massive and completely unexpected. It is, without a doubt, the worst case scenario. The zombie apocalypse could easily be written off as silly fiction, except for the fact that even though the cause is fiction, the symptoms of the apocalypse are real and have been seen time and time again. In reality, society is very fragile. It would only take a small nudge to cause a descent into chaos. Look at hurricane Katrina, for example. New Orleans was devastated overnight and people went crazy. There was looting, violence, bodies laying around destroyed buildings and more. If you took a picture of the area and superimposed a zombie into the middle of it, the picture could be a screen capture from the movie I mentioned above.
It’s not just hurricanes. Look at your average riot. It doesn’t take much to send people into a frenzy. There’s been widespread destruction and violence for no other reason than the local sports team won a championship game. Yeah…”won”. The riots are almost as bad when they lose.
The takeaway is that the worst disasters are the ones you don’t see coming and there are a lot of them that can happen literally overnight. I spent many years working as a network administrator. The main task in that field is to make sure your servers maintain 99.99% uptime (referred to as the “four nines” in the industry). To do this, you had to anticipate the absolute worst case scenarios and then account for them in your system’s design. Power Outage? Install a battery backup and a generator. Internet failure? Have multiple connections through more than one provider. Hardware failure? Multiple, mirrored servers with automatic failover. Seriously, there’s about a 100+ item checklist we usually go through.
These Preppers are essentially doing the same thing. Like I said, zombies are the worst case scenario. If you plan for the worst, then you’ve pretty much accounted for everything else. It’s a good strategy and it works.
Here’s the problem: There are very few people willing to actually explain that concept to the casual observer. At the same time, there’s very few casual observers who would care or understand. It’s kind of like what I used to say to people when they asked me why I would put a Nitrous Oxide system on a muscle car that already has 400+ horsepower: “If you have to ask in the first place, there’s no way I could explain it to you.” (In reality, it was given to me and was never actually hooked up. The NOS system was just for show but the previous response sounded way better).
So the public sees these firearm enthusiasts and preppers talking about zombies, buying zombie themed ammo and zombie themed guns and they just roll their eyes. We’re already suffering from a negative perception (fortunately, a rapidly shrinking one) and I don’t see the need to give them any more fuel.
So while I appreciate and respect the metaphor at hand, can we please brainstorm a bit to come up with a new one that doesn’t make us look like a bunch of geeks LARPing in the local park?
Image used under Creative Commons License from Dave Hogg.
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