The Walking Dead 2

Here I am, somewhat awake at four in the morning here in the heart of Zombie Nation. Vancouver is its capital city. I think that my city of Vancouver is particularly deserving of this less than flattering epithet. We of course, have about as high a percentage of smartphone users as anywhere else, and this is where the walking dead really seem to excel in their lack of awareness. They are like walking heads, completely detached from their bodies as they walk into everything and step in all kinds of disgusting substances because they can't peal their eyes for one moment from their precious little screens. One woman on Facebook (which I no longer read), a born-again atheist intent on proving to the world that atheists are not only every bit a righteous as people of religious fait, but even more righteous, was writing a series of shrill and strident posts about how people have no right judging parents who are stuck on their phones while they are out with their children. This apparently had been her reaction to a sign that was posted in front of a local school. The principal was kindly suggesting that parents picking up or dropping off their precious little darlings spend more time interacting with their kids than their phones. Little Miss Righteous and Godless screamed loud and harsh that anyone agreeing with this was being judgy-ass. That they might be looking for employment and checking listings, or they could be desperately seeking housing, or access to a food bank, or whatever. I'm sure that all those things and others could provide very valid reasons for mommy and daddy looking at their phones. But I think that little Miss Righteous and Godless was protesting a little bit too much, and the likelihood that mommy or daddy were in the middle of an emergency was not going to be all that likely. Truth is, children can be very boring, especially when they are your own and especially when you have no choice but to have to be around them all the time, when really you would like to be somewhere else, do something else and naturally you're going to want some kind of harmless small distraction before you are driven crazy by yet one more dumb little kid question. And they do not love their precious little spawn any less. But they feel stranded and trapped, just like all the citizens of Zombie Nation. There is no life in a smartphone, no healing magic, no spiritual mana to convert our souls and spirits into suddenly perceiving visions of joy and universal bliss. But we are hopelessly bored, which is to say that we are hopelessly frightened and paralyzed by fear, while stuck in occupations and living arrangements that are far less than ideal, while unable to make ourselves beautiful and perfect and god-like the way the advertisers pushing useless cosmetics and other products tell us we need to, if we are to buy their useless garbage, which would seem particularly true for women. Even though women have made huge advances in securing equal rights and empowerment (and still have a lot farther to go), many are going to be naturally fearful and suspicious of men, since for the most part, a lot of representatives of the male gender still tend to behave like pigs. While queer people have also been making admirable advances, we still have a lot of (mostly) male homophobic wankers shunning us, and being afraid of being thought to be gay. Even though we have become a multiracial and multicultural society, there is still a fear of the other that keeps a lot of people isolated within their ghettoes. And even among regular white folk? We are the most pathetic! We whine and whimper about how hard it is to make friends in this god-awful, but creepily pretty city, and yet we cling to our phones and ignore each other, perhaps because we only want to make friends with the right kind of people, and no one is going to wake up and notice that we are the right kind of people, and just by reaching out to us we suddenly find them way too needy to be the right kind of anybody, which is exactly how we are going to be perceived when we reach out to them because we, the citizens of zombie nations are such a pathetic swill of narcissism. And those who do wake up, and come to life, we are the ones least trusted and held in suspicion because we have dared to break the code of silence.