Pubdate: Mon, 02 Jul 2012
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/letters.html
Website: http://www.calgaryherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Kevin Brooker

ZOMBIES ROAM THE LAND - MAYBE

I'm not one for following which topics are trending on Twitter, but I 
couldn't help pay attention to reports that #zombieapocalypse has 
been way up there for the past month.

Whereas I'd like to think this is primarily due to the ironic 
keyboard musings of hipsters from the Zombie Walk constituency, it's 
becoming disturbingly apparent that there is a considerable 
population that actually considers roving, undead brain-eaters to be 
a clear and present danger.

Witness last week's bizarre but, by all reports, serious emergency 
preparedness exercise in Bangor, Maine. Officials paid 
Hollywood-style makeup artists to apply pallor and weeping wounds 
onto some 100 volunteers, who then enacted a chaotic scenario that 
involved infecting others through bites.

Some were quick to condemn the exercise as foolish, alarmist, 
gratuitous and even disinformational, given that the weak of mind 
might naturally deduce that zombies are real. But apologists in the 
media declared it was just a harmless way to lighten up a task they'd 
be doing anyway with some other horrible, fictive premise. Besides, 
they said, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have been employing 
the zombie trope for a while now, believing it to be an excellent way 
to over-come the public's boredom with garden-variety terrors.

"If you are generally well-equipped to deal with a zombie 
apocalypse," the CDC's director, Dr. Ali Khan, has actually said, 
"you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earth-quake or 
terrorist attack."

It's curious, then, that while promoting it else-where, the CDC is 
also in the business of quelling zombie-related panic. After the May 
incident of the Miami face-eater that sparked the current hysteria, a 
spokesman felt it necessary to tell a news agency, "The CDC does not 
know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one 
that would present zombielike symptoms)."

Obviously, zombies are boffo box office if you're in any industry 
that profits from the contagion of fear. Like those Maine public 
safety officials: See these hideous, corpse-like threats? Perhaps you 
need to give us more money and more power so that we can be more prepared.

The media like it, too, and lately it's as if George Romero himself 
has taken over the city desk. Guy bites brother's nose in drunken 
fight: zombie. Man spits blood into police officer's face: zombie. 
Tom Cruise to divorce Katie Holmes - well, I'm sure there's a zombie 
tie-in there somewhere.

Of course, the zombie fad will fade away soon enough. But its story 
arc won't be forgotten. It will linger at least as a subconscious 
addition to our ever-bulging Rolodex of terror threats, proving that 
even a hypothetical menace that is completely manufactured in a 
frightened mind can per-form some useful service. For somebody.

Meanwhile, this is but another example of how, in this 2012 year of 
the apocalypse, we need to get better at speaking out against 
gratuitous fear mongering. We need to stop playing our part in it 
through our craven responses. Leaders need to employ reason, not rash 
emotionalism, when it comes to assessing threats of any kind.

We also need to ask why media in general expend 1,000 times more 
energy stoking the fear surrounding something unknown - like, for 
example, the latest drug threat, bath salts - than explaining what 
the substance actually is and why anyone would decide to use it more than once.

You probably didn't hear the news last week that an autopsy 
determined that the face-eater, who had been enthusiastically 
characterized as a bath-salts zombie, actually didn't have any of the 
substance in his system. Apparently, that story didn't have legs, 
like all follow-ups that fail to justify the feverish initial reports.

Remember Aesop's fable? It was only the last time the boy cried wolf, 
when there actually was a wolf, that the flock was destroyed.

We have a duty to resist all inducements to cower before the state, 
to automatically mistrust others, and above all, to fear totally and 
irrationally.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom