How do you kill a zombie? “Shoot it in the head,” says my roommate. Faced with armies of the undead, he is surprisingly calm. And why shouldn’t he be? Zombieism, it would seem, has become a part of this American life.
Today’s college student has grown up surrounded by stories of post-apocalyptic survivors waging impromptu war against lifeless hordes. The zombie menace is alive and well in the dorm rooms of America, and its popularity is a sign that our generation might just have a fighting chance as it enters a near thoughtless society.
Fundamental to the zombie genre is the ubiquitous failure of authority. The zombies attack because the planners erred, the politicians blundered, and the police were simply overrun by waves of the kidney-chewing horrors. Abandoned by the protectors meant to shield him from harm, the common man is left to rely on himself.
Heroism versus the zombie hordes is made of resilience, determination, ingenuity and intelligence pitted against an endless sea of unthinking monsters. Fans of the genre have always witnessed these virtues on the screen, and now video games have made this experience a personal one. Like my roommate, an entire generation of game-players and movie-goers know that when the dead walk the earth, they are their own best hope for survival.
That millions of young Americans are ready for the zombie apocalypse bodes well for the future. Even more frightening than decomposing ghouls out for blood is the endless tide of mindless legislation clawing at We The People. Insisting that we must be protected from ourselves, the powerful have saddled us all with nanny-like laws ranging from the obscene (an expensive and deadly War on Drugs) to the obese (absurd bans of trans fats and even salt). There are quite literally millions of these behavior controls, and they only make us more thoughtless by the day.
This is the true threat we as a generation face: the grinding, bureaucratic elimination of our ability to think independently. Cheese cannot be called Swiss without holes of a specific diameter, according to the FDA, and the FCC will not allow certain naughty words to be heard on broadcast television. Marriage, gay or straight, is somehow the business of white-haired Senators, and now the District of Columbia has decided to put a tax on shopping bags. No one is allowed to decide what to eat, think or do for themselves. Our generation has been told that it must be kept safe from itself.
The authorities, infamous for their failure to defend against the undead, attack the individual with a more malicious contagion than any virus: paternalism. Convinced that free individuals are incapable of making good decisions for themselves, they have removed that ability from all of the people. This is not a matter of a single issue or even a single ideology. If a life is defined by the choices each person makes, we are all in danger of losing the ability to shape our own lives. As college students struggling already to discover who we are, this is unacceptable. When free will, for better or worse, is taken away, we become little more than zombies ourselves.
It is the great fortune of our generation that we have been raised to fight zombieism in all its forms. Like the screen heroes of apocalypses past, our hope to live on as free and thinking people rests on our ability to reject failed authority and determine our own destinies. The best weapon against this real-life zombification is BRAAAAIIINNNS.
Ian Hosking is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs the College of Arts and Sciences and an ignorant columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com.
