Zombie CSU (36 page)

Expert Witness

A lot of writers have speculated the concept that humans, facing an unbearable situation such as their own friends and family coming back from the dead, would not be able to cope with it on a spiritual or psychological level. People would break, their emotions would race out of control and then explode like overworked turbines, their sanity would rupture, and long before the zombies won the war the humans and their fragile minds would lose it.

This is a disturbing concept, and I put it, and some related questions, to my experts on psychology, religion, and philosophy. Their answers may disturb you.

“One of the requirements for sanity,” says therapist Jerry Waxler,
¹
M.S., “is to develop a set of rules about life that let you predict with some sort of certainty what is normal and what is not. When the rules are broken too severely it can lead to a breakdown. For example, soldiers in Vietnam went in assuming they were protecting their orderly, civilized way of life. Then when they found that to survive, they had to shoot women and children, it created a conflict that drove many of them to the brink. The same is true for zombies. If you discover a loved one, a family member or even spouse wants to eat you—the shock goes far beyond any ethical consideration. Your very definition of what is sane in the world becomes disturbed to the breaking point. At that point, you are casting off from the realm of psychology, and into the realm of prayer. May God have mercy on our souls.”

“There is a point where what happens in the mind and what happens in the soul are part of the same process,” says Kanchana Patel, Ph.D., a consultant with the University of Mumbai. “When we experience a global event such as the Indonesian tsunami we are, as a people, struck to the heart. An event of this kind is too large to allow a purely personal reaction. Our reactions are not only social, but they interact and collide in a panic as everyone else tries to both understand the
why
of the event and at the same time grasp the simple science of it. It is difficult, in the moment, to step back and say with dispassion that plate tectonics are a fact of life and there is nothing personal in it, just as there is no personal malice, no intent to harm in a volcano or a typhoon, and yet while the winds are blowing or the ash is falling we cling together and scream out ‘Why?’ as if the storm itself will speak an answer. When no answer comes we pray and when prayers do not appear to be answered—at least in any way we can perceive—we despair. Hot lava from a volcano may kill many people by destroying their bodies, but it is despair—that sudden, terrible thought that the universe is out to get them and that no other celestial force is willing or able to intervene. How strange it is that faith of such intensity exists at the moment of death, or in those moments leading up to a sure and certain belief in death; and how sad that this faith is the total certainty that the universe wants to murder them.”

Waxler adds, “While I have never lived through a zombie attack, I have witnessed in my lifetime two national traumas, the assassination of John Kennedy, and the crashing of the World Trade Center on 9/11. In both cases, the national psyche was severely wounded. The collective pain and disruption was far-reaching, and because such severe trauma takes place outside the reach of logic, you can only understand its effects by observing its aftermath. After 9/11 we responded by collectively moving into a defensive stance. Airport security lines, and the two wars we are fighting simultaneously are direct results of 9/11. It’s not quite so easy to understand how JFK’s assassination affected the national psyche. One thing is that, decades later, it still feels like a knife through my heart. And I wonder if some of the craziness of the late sixties was a sort of reaction against the disturbance of the assassination. The loss of an orderly world leads to some strange behavior.”

Nick Ladany, professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University, takes a slightly different view. “People would adjust more quickly to death and go back to seeing it as more natural, rather than the sterile and removed way death is dealt with currently. In the past, the primary place for children to play was in cemeteries and it was not uncommon for bones to pop up every now and then after a storm. But because death was seen as a natural process, it was not seen as so unusual. Imagine today if a parent was with a child when a bone of a dead person popped up out of the ground.”

Dr. Patel of Mumbai recalls, “My grandmother was in New Delhi the evening that Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by Nathuram Godse. Like many women my grandmother was so convinced that Gandhi would be the one to permanently change things for the better. He was for the liberation of women, for the end to untouchability, for unification of religious and social groups, and for an end to poverty. Could a man have higher aspirations or be more selfless, and yet the
Akhil Bhāratīya Hindū Mahāsabhā
²
sent assassins to kill him, and they did kill him, using a gun to shoot down a man who would not have raised an arm to block a slap to the face. Grandmother told me that on that night, as news reports came over the radio that Gandhi was dead, that she felt some of herself die, too. She said that Gandhi, as political as he was, had brought a hopeful innocence to the world and now it was dead. I thought about that and then about what you asked me about how we would react if the dead rose to attack the living. Truly, I believe that if the dead rose, if we were at war with our own beloved dead, all innocence would die long before the battle was won by either side. I do not know that, as a people, as a race, we would psychically survive such an event; and if we physically survived it we would be a different people.”

Joyce Kearney, Ph.D., an interfaith pastor and counselor at the Burlington House in New Jersey, says, “I don’t think the issue of killing one’s neighbors—should they become zombies—will do as much psychological or spiritual harm as killing one’s family. Particularly the children. Not only would this cause rips in the fabric of the mind and soul, if the zombie menace were to continue for any length of time then no one would dare to get pregnant. There might be some desperation ‘save me’ kind of sex, but who would want to bring new life into a world where death ruled?”

This view, however, would come about if humanity was believed to be losing the war against the zombies. If the situation was desperate but under some kind of visible control, the deepest levels of panic might not kick in, an opinion to which my experts agreed.

“But if we were seen to be losing that fight things would go terribly wrong, terribly fast. It would destroy our ability to think about the world,” insists Dr. Patel. “Not only would conception fall off, but there would be a rise of what you could call ‘compassionate murder.’ This would not be euthanasia of someone infected by the zombie bite; but murders of healthy children and probably of the elderly, and husbands killing wives and wives killing husbands. Why? Because people would know that to die of a zombie bite would be the practical equivalent of being damned to eternal hell and torment. Mercy killings would seem reasonable to guarantee that their loved ones would never become the living dead. This would, of course, be a catastrophe of incalculable proportions, but worse still would be what would happen if the plague was ended. Imagine surviving such a calamity knowing that you killed your family and that the zombies may never have been able to because the government was getting on top of the situation. You would see yet another round of suicides…so long after the last zombie was destroyed you would still be seeing new deaths.”

Rabbi Shevack, an interfaith leader,
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believes that our national psyche would also be a victim of an uncontrolled zombie rampage. “Zombies would destroy the national psyche, just as they would destroy nationality itself. Most dividing lines would fall. Zombies wouldn’t care if it was American flesh or Mexican flesh. They’d eat heterosexuals or homosexuals. Neo-cons or pandering liberals would be equal entrees. All our precious politics and national agendas would be consumed, voraciously, by zombies; as the living dead, they become the living-equalizers! And the Constitution? Well, that would just be carbohydrates.”