One
of the main questions that came up in the discussion about Zombies,
over at the Doomstead Diner, is whether killing them is advisable or
not. The main concern is that the title "Zombie" is a
demonizing title that places blame for the American Hologram in the
wrong place. Rather than blaming the rich, sociopathic,
Corporatocracy Masters that have the good fortune of being on top of
the pyramid, we are blaming the "Zombies" who are too
worthless to live. Apparently the Libertarians have co-opted the
word to describe retired government workers with pensions. Cause,
you know, the retired government workers with pensions are the main
reason why we can't get the budget balanced? Never mind the hundreds
of billions a year just keeping the military machine kickin' ass and
takin' brown people's gas, or the billions in government subsidized
CEO bonuses, or the trillions of printed dollars given to the same
sociopathic assholes running the too big to fail banks, it's the
government pensioners that are the Zombies suckin' the balance out of
the budget. Fuck politics...and that concludes my response to the
libertarians and their co-opting of the word "Zombie."
I've gone to great lengths to outline, describe, and define what I
consider Zombies to be, and I will not be doing so again. I want to
talk about the possibility of killing zombies in a post-collapse
scenario to protect and defend your post-petroleum tribe's resources.
Naturally
the discussion about killing zombies ended up in the realm of
religion. "Man does not live by bread alone," inevitably
came up. True, man doesn't live by bread alone, but he can't live
without it either. He will die without the bread, and the zombies
want his bread, so what's man to do? Especially a man with children
and a wife to keep alive. Recently I've had cause to reflect on the
action of killing due to participating in some killin' myself.
Basically, best I can tell, life requires death. This is true all
the way to the level of virus (which aren't technically considered
living organisms). In order for the virus to replicate cells must
die. Seems the only life forms that don't directly require death are
plants and autotrophs. The rest of us need shit to die in order for
us to live. To illustrate my point, I'm going to use an anecdote
from my recent life.
I
have 3 Rhode Island Red hens, 11 Deleware Hens, and a Rhode Island
Red rooster named Archimedes all living in a chicken shack that I've
created via Scavenge Engineering named "Eggmahal." It's
been dubbed Eggmahal cause that's where my hens poop out the
nutritious back yard chicken eggs that I feed to my family and sell.
I sell the eggs for 3 dollars a dozen in an attempt to cover my costs
for keeping said chickens. This allows me to have a steady supply of
better quality chicken eggs then I can buy, as well as fertilizer and
stored meat to feed my family (no better way to store meat than on
the hoof...or in this case, on chicken feet). Keeping chickens
requires you be willing to kill to keep them. If you aren't willing
to kill the occasional chicken, or chicken egg, predator, than you
might as well not bother keeping them. I'm the only thing that's
going to kill any of my chickens or take any of their eggs.
So
a couple of days ago I went into my coop to do the daily routine of
feeding and watering the chickens as well as collecting the eggs. I
walked over to the nesting boxes to collect the eggs and there was
Mr. King snake with an egg half way in his mouth. He had found him a
wonderful all you can eat king snake buffet equipped with a comfy new
home to live in. He couldn't ask for a better set up. All he had to
do was lay in the nice cozy nest box with a bed of hay, and whenever
he got hungry he'd just reach on over to one of the other boxes and
snatch an egg. Hell, he didn't even have to move more than a foot.
He had quite literally found himself a snake paradise. Not on my
watch Jack. My identifying him set off a chain reaction of immediate
snake dispatching. I went straight into the Gypsy House, got my
Earth Scalpel (a flat tipped short shovel) and a trashcan. I went
back into the coop and jabbed the shovel into the snakes neck
trapping him in the nest box. I then began, with my upper
body, pushing as hard as I could. My shovel has not been sharpened
so I simply broke his neck. This made him a bit more docile, and I
was able to get him into the trashcan where I then took him out of
the coop, dumped him out on the grass, and finished the job with my
machete (which is one I found backpacking a few years back and never
got around to sharpening...sooo it was a little messy).
Now,
I don't want to kill anything. I really don't. I derive no pleasure
from killing, but I also eat meat. Do you eat meat? Cause if you do
then you kill every time you eat it. It's not violent for you, you
just go to the store and get your sterilized meat that comes from the
grocery store refrigerator. Or you go to a restaurant where all you
have to do is shovel said dead meat into your meat hole. Eating
meat, in the reality outside of the Matrix, requires you to violently
kill, gut, skin, quarter, and butcher whatever meat you want to cook.
We have lost touch with this reality.
Unfortunately
the very next day, I went into Eggmahal to take care of the chickens,
and there was King Snake number two...he was an upgraded version of
Mr King Snake #1. I noticed that the nest box just to the right of
the one the other snake was in, had a new snake in it. He was twice
as large as the first as well. I went and got the Earth Scalpel and
attempted the same method I used the day before. However his neck
was much larger in diameter and so all it did was piss him off. He
tried to make his escape by going to the coop floor to rather
hurriedly slither off. I jabbed with my shovel and separated his
head from his body like Disney's Hercules did to the Hydra of Lerna.
It took him about 30 minutes to figure this out for himself. I
apologized to him while he was laying there watching his headless
body slither around oblivious to it's new headless status. I thought
about having the common courtesy to at least remove his head from the
situation...so he at least didn't have to watch...but failed to do
so.
Now
I didn't want to kill either of those snakes. In fact, after slaying
the first snake, I went into the Gypsy House and announced to all of
the snakes in ear shot that they could eat all of the rodents they
wanted to, but that if they touched my chickens, chicken eggs,
children, or family, that they would end up like captain headless
over there watching his headless body aimlessly coil around. It's
nothing personal I said, just...you can't have my damn eggs. I'm not
starving. I don't have to have those chickens or those eggs to feed
my family right now. I may, in the near future, require them to feed
my family, but right now just in time truckin' is truckin' along just
fine (well it's not fine, actually it's anything but fine...but it
doesn't know that...and neither do the zombies). So I didn't have to
kill either of those snakes (nor the two I killed last year) for my
survival. I killed those snakes because their presence makes a
mockery of my chicken keeping. The bottom line is that I'm not
keeping chickens to feed the local fauna. I'm keeping chickens to
feed my family nutritious food, and to provide them with some food
security. You see, when JIT truckin' stops truckin' just in
time...I'll have a source of food to keep my family fed.
Only
there is a problem with keeping those chickens to keep my family fed
in that post-collpase world I see potentially around any corner
anytime now. That problem is that I'm not the only one who wants to
eat those eggs and chicken asses. In a post collapse world there
will be zombies who will want to eat my chicken asses. I'm not doing
the work of keeping those chickens to feed zombies. Yet if I were
not willing to use force to keep zombies from eating my chicken
asses, then they WILL eat my chicken asses, and then what was the
point in having said chicken asses to begin with? I don't want to
kill anybody, or anything, but I want to ensure my family is fed more
than I don't want to kill. My killing the snakes isn't exactly a
product of that, since I admit I don't need those chickens right now,
but it's still something I must do to make my chicken keeping efforts
not pointless.
Now,
killing snakes in times of relative peace just on account of my
chicken egg count is something entirely different from killing a
zombie (or zombies rather) in a post collapse world. I'm not
comparing the value of the life of that snake to that of a
hypothetical zombie. What I'm saying is that I didn't want to kill
either of those snakes. When I identified that there was a "snake
in the box"... it ruined my day instantly because I knew that my
day now required me to kill something violently (I mean...how else
does one kill anything really?) and with extreme prejudice. The
matter is further complicated by the type of snake. King snakes are
a great snake to have around because they eat other snakes (hence the
"king" in the title). They are thought to be immune to the
venom of poisonous snakes. Also, which annoys me in this case, they
are of no threat to humans. This is a good snake to have around if
you're going to have snakes around. I feel bad for killing both of
them. But they can't have my eggs. There is no way I know of to get
them to understand that they can live if they just leave my eggs
alone. So they must die. I'm not going to want to kill any zombies
either, but I am going to want to feed my family
Man
doesn't live on bread alone. I believe that. I really do. There is
more to life than this life. There is consciousness beyond my
brains. I believe that as well. However I'm a father, and that's in
this life. I can't make sure my children are fed if I'm dead, and I
won't watch my children starve in this life either. I'll do whatever
I need to do to make sure they are well fed. There are grave dangers
in labeling the majority of people zombies. They become infected and
less then human. It becomes alright ethically to kill something that
is already dead. This is damaging to the human psyche. It's really
the same process that goes on in the mind of a soldier who's
convinced himself that these people are somehow less then people. Or
as the Nazi's labeled the Jews, "Lebensunwertes Leben" or
"life not worthy of life." When is it ever justifiable to
kill people? I would answer that by saying it is justifiable to kill
a person whom is trying to kill you, or yours for that matter. So
it's justifiable to kill in order to stay alive. We do that every
time we eat meat. Granted we aren't killing humans.
In
just about every case of a society collapsing there has been
cannibalism documented. We are at a point in the history of our
species where we are talking about near term human extinction due to
run away anthropomorphic global temperature rise. It seems WW111 is
lookin' to start up over in Syria, and we have nuclear power plants
that are spoogin' radioactivity into the acidifying ocean environment
faster than you can say "death by cancer." Our world is in
a terrible way just now. Everything we take for granted as normal in
relation to our quality of life is built on a network of
non-renewable resources that are becoming scarcer by the second.
Every day there are less species on our planet than there is today,
and that as well can be placed at the feet of humanity. The fact
that zombies are real is a sad and depressing fact. But it is a
fact. Like those snakes attempting to take up residence at Eggmahal,
and therefore forcing me to kill them. I can imagine zombies doing
the same in the near future as a reality I will live to see. I can
guarantee my sons will see it...if I don't. Those zombies will force
me to kill them if my son's starvin' belly is on the line. It will
be their decision. I will do everything I can to not kill them. I
will give warnings and wait till the last minute. But in the end,
when it comes to my children being fed or me killing a zombie...I'm
sorry to say the zombie will have to go. Just like those snakes.
The
best we can do is attempt to curtail that eventuality by fostering
community. Get the zombies involved and try to wake them up. But
that's a waste of time. They can't be made to have the Epiphany
Now. I've tried. The only zombies that wake up are those that
decide they want to wake up. The hard cold bitch of a fact is that
our world is FUBAR and getting worse by the day. Life requires death
and nature doesn't select organisms whom readily die. The fact of
the matter is that we are headed into times that could easily feature
such things as cannabalism...just like the last complex societies that
collapsed and began eating one another. I'd rather be a zombie
slayin' professional than a person eater. Guess what zombies are
good at? They're good at turning you into a cannibal cause they ate
all of your chicken asses and taters. So maybe I'm an ass hole for
talking about such things. Maybe I'm delusional and our society is
not doomed to the reality of zombies. What I know is that I'm a
survivor. Before I'm eating other people I'm gonna be the meanest,
toughest, most calloused, bad ass professional zombie dispatching
agent you've ever met. Cause fuck eatin' another human. That's not
my idea of a world I wanna be in...or that I want for my sons.
Here's to the hope that renewable energy will curtail World War Z.
But so far...and this is the most important fact, it seems just now
that Zombie Whispering is working just fine. Zombies aren't really
that dangerous until the shit hits the fan.
Here's a video I made after killing the second snake. Warning...the video features a snake that has been decapitated...although you can't see any blood and it looks like it hasn't been aside from the shovel that's separating the head from the body.
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