Dear Zombie,


Damn! I'm disgusted with how you're being treated! It's just awful. All the limb-chopping, head-squashing, brain-blowing violence –– the sheer brutality of it is mind-numbing. And your physical depiction as reanimated death! –– weeks of burial induced repugnance suddenly and inexplicably rendered in what just moments before was a dead but reasonably attractive person. How unmerited! And your character assassination. Portraying every cursed one of you as utterly without compunction or personality is the height of stereotyping and the worst of profiling. It's shameful and inhumane behavior. I'd like to apologize on behalf of all us insensitive would-be zombies.

You poor wretches. So unmercifully loathsome, who could feel any sympathy for you? –– when you deserve all the compassion that could ever be shared! So pitiful you could only be conceived by the pitiless, you've been hatched with nothing but cruelty in mind.

I'm so sorry! It's so unfair that you're denied the consciousness that could be appreciative of my feelings about your appalling fate. And anyway, for all your inarticulate groaning, how could you politely respond to my concern for your well-being? It's unconscionable that you, bereft of voice and rapport, would leave me absolutely no means to wring out my sodden sentimentality, and you've no choice but to act out a loveless and cannibalizing relationship with me. It's just plain obnoxious that both you and I are forced to be so incongruously human.

Hell, even philosophers are getting in on the action –– mentally debasing you with their "philosophical zombie" thought experiments –– seemingly oblivious to the zombic nature of using the miracle of sentience to form and defend opinions about the veracity of abstract mindlessness. Is the irony utterly lost on these brainiacs that zombies want nothing but to eat their creators, and the best way to kill one is with a "head shot?"

What galls me no end though is how you suffer at the hands of screenwriters and producers and whatnot. Slapstick aside, what's really the point of being relentlessly chased and terrified by that which we ourselves have shaped through some form of ill-considered genetic tinkering? In every trans-armageddon feature you've ever populated, it's the silly protagonists that persist in martyring you –– mindlessly repeating the same old idiotic, short-sighted, and murderous behavior that presumably necessitates the expunging of our species to begin with. How absurd! Once any sort of dead, how could it ever actually dawn on us that it's too late to survive? And if that's the symbolic point of the story, then why are you, as surrogate for our sins, never allowed redemption? Must we torment ourselves with the idea that death could somehow be undone all the way to our extinction? Such sad doomed zombie characters we all are!

So that is the point, isn't it? Zombies aren't the threat of what could become of us, but what we already are in the eyes of life. Are we so consciously dead to what animates us that we act out all manner of berserk pursuit and ravenous consumption of that which gives us life? Is life's only option, in self-defense, to lop off our deranged head?

Sigh

Oh miserable zombie, I'm so embarrassed by our gratuitous maltreatment of you. How could we atone? Would it be enough to forgive you for what you are? –– what we are? After all we are reanimated death –– life continuously revived. Must we mindlessly terrify and consume our life's promise in the maltreatment of our children? –– infecting ourselves with contempt for life? Perhaps with forgiveness of what we are, and appreciation of what we are becoming, we could be reanimated in a form more abiding of love and compassion!


Your chagrined admirer,

d.s