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Embrace the Zombie Apocalypse | B.K. Marcus
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Zombie Craze as Medium and a Message
- As a medium, zombies can be used as a comparison and an example to better discuss concerns and problems in the community.
- It could also serve as a message to promote awareness on how zombies are being reflected in the society.
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Zombie Symbolism
A lot of symbolism can be interpreted in popular zombie films.
The undead are the ultimate other of any us-and-them division, especially if you consider us to be savvy and them to be brainless. But Zombies were not used as just a frightening enemy, but were used to show the ills of the society: consumerism, capitalism, terrorism, etc.
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Zombie Economics
Zombie economics refers to theories or ideas that are long gone, but still refuse to die.
At this basic metaphorical level, "zombie economics," for example, can describe socialists or free-market thinking, depending on which side you believe holds the monopoly on functioning synapses.
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Zombification
... refers to a powerful image of what governments try to do to their citizens — to create a uniform, homogeneous population, incapable of acting independently.
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Doomsday prophecies
American popular culture is overflowing with doomsday prophecies and end-of-the-world scenarios.. is there some weird kind of wish-fulfillment at work in all these visions of near-universal death and destruction?
Wish fulfillment refers to the satisfaction of a desire through an involuntary thought process such as dreams. BUT the term can be misleading. Wish fulfillment does not designate the obviously desirable things one might openly wish for.
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Zombie Apocalypse shows...
... might be described as federalist in spirit. The aim seems to be to reduce the size of government radically and thereby to bring it closer to the people. Cut back to regional or local units, government becomes manageable again and ordinary people get to participate in it actively, recovering a say in the decisions that affect their lives.
In some cases, people lose something valuable but later on discovers that the apocalypse has some advantages: being closer with the family, more personal health care, etc.
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Chaos theory
There is, at a very deep level, a growing dissatisfaction with the centralized status quo. But for most people, the solution is far from clear. In the popular imagination, central government is associated with order; the state and the society are understood to rise and fall together. What we have lost is the key insight of the classical liberal tradition that society runs itself, that liberty is the wellspring of balance and order. Not only does the growing government bureaucracy reduce our wealth and our welfare; it is also the cause of the very chaos we fear.
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Misconceptions About Zombies
A zombie is a walking corpse, a living dead. But not all walking corpse is a zombie.
Unlike many other undead, the zombie is mindless, vacant, without purpose. The zom...
How Zombies are Reflected in Life
A lot of people have related zombies to the lives of humans, mostly social ills, including consumerism, racism, capitalism, and terrorism.
Most of the films about zombies are not about the zombies themselves, but on how people cope or with the reality of the undead.
Samsara = Life of a Zombie
Samsara is a belief in Buddhism meaning the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. It is new life, but it is still full of suffering. As long as we are alive, suffering is present because it is natural for us to wish for good things not to end even though we knew that it would.
Just like the zombie which suffers because of its endless hunger, never satisfied and moves on to another prey which also ends up as a zombie.
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Zombies Gaining Popularity
Zombies, a staple of pop culture horror, first started appearing in novels and pulp magazines in the 20s, finally debuting on celluloid in 1932 with the movie White Zombie, though many att...
The Origin Of The Zombie Folklore
The word ‘Zombie’ is derived from West African languages, with the Mitsogo language of Gabon describing them as ‘ndzumbi’, which means a corpse, to the Kongo language using the word ‘nzambi’ meaning the spirit of a dead person.
Pop culture and folklore from the Caribbean and Haiti seem to be the birthplaces for the concept of zombies that the American audiences crave so much.
Zombies From The Caribbean Region
- The Caribbean and its surrounding areas carried a large number of slaves, transporting them across the Atlantic, for making them work in farming. This created a mix of religions and infused many different traditions and practices like Catholicism, voodoo, Obeah and Santeria.
- Certain ‘bokors’ or witch-doctors in Martinique and Haiti created magic potions and used hypnotic spells to render victims dead, and then enslave or capture them, making them their personal slaves, The zombie, thus became a slave without any will or name, trapped forever in a living hell.
- The French Colony (later Haiti) where slaves were especially big in number and suffered the worst, witnessed a rebellion, and the rulers were overthrown in 1791. In 1915, when The US occupied Haiti, the native religion of Voodoo was spread even more. Stories of the vengeful dead coming out of the grave and chasing people became popular in pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s.
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"Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity, that’s just human nat..."
Max Brooks, World War Z
Lack of practical skills
Our modern job descriptions largely rely on our minds rather than our physical skills in order to get work done.
Having some basic practical skills to complement your “soft” skills will certainly come in handy in survival scenarios, particularly when it comes to rebuilding from catastrophe. And you can develop them by simply trying things out.
Practice self-reliance in advance
Not only will having DIY skills help you rebuild your community, they also greatly increase your self-reliance.
This means being able to take care of yourself and survive with little and work with what you have. But don't wait until you need to be self-reliant to cultivate these skills.