YOU'RE ALIVE: ACT LIKE IT.

By Alexandra Rae

A PULSE CHECK AND CULTURAL INTROSPECTION

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Content Warning: This article contains strong language & mentions of graphic violence.

Apathy: complete lack of emotion about a human being, thing, or activity. 

On one of my weekly walks around the city, I saw it manifest in pedestrians and drivers alike. Going through the world without really noticing the world, there was the group of bicyclists who, ignoring the red hand telling them to wait, cut in front of the off-duty ambulance, sirens silent as a ship in the night as they slammed on their breaks behind the green light. The homeless man covered in piss whom the bicyclists passed, sleeping on concrete littered with cigarette butts and chip wrappers. The mother of three emerging from the phone store, two children in a stroller and one waddling beside her, typing something into her new black screen while the waddler pulled at her pink jacket for attention. A black lab sniffing brown sludge on the sidewalk, his owner digging in a camouflage backpack for a lighter with a Marlboro in his mouth while the stroller passed by with toddlers crying to pet the puppy. A girl my age in faded gray pajama pants, crying into her cell phone on the low tide of the city’s curb. The employee inside the coffee shop, sweeping the same spot on the mat over and over, his eyes glazed like the donuts behind the counter, only noticing me when I said “Excuse me” to squeeze by him. He looked at me, then, as if I had threatened him with a knife, or asked him how his day was going. It was clear to me he would have felt accosted by both. Then he snapped out of whatever daze he was in and stepped to the left to let me through. I offered all that I could: a smile. I said what I thought I had to say to any person I talk to now. “I’m sorry.”

When I walked back out into the world, trying not to begin another one of my anti-fast fashion rants when the group of teenagers in front of me began comparing their Shein hauls, the pantsuit-clad driver behind a white Volkswagen told me I could cross the street by flipping me off. If her windows were down, maybe I would have told her sorry too. 

This is what our society has come to – apologizing for interacting with one another, reminding the other of our own aliveness. Digital engagement is fine, encouraged even. Physical engagement? “Hello”; “How are you today?”; “Such weather we’re having!”? Not so much. So much gone, so much lost. 

To not care for the safety of others on the road or see bodies on concrete and only think of them as bodies; buy your way out of an existential crisis; keep your head low and ears pumped with music, eyes on a dark screen, to avoid being perceived is a symptom of what I call cultural zombification. It is no longer the fear of a few becoming undead creatures with no moral compass that is most relevant – the society at large, particularly that of the Western world, is un-deadening themselves into a new kind of numbness. Products of the consumerist, impassive post-humanist era, zombies walk the streets, log on to Zoom calls, watch a genocide unfolding on cellphones, stare back at you in the mirror. 

Terrified! How I hope you feel at the thought of this state of anti-being. Uninterested or unbothered may be more accurate, further proving the presence of cultural zombification. To convince you of fearing this, I must first convince you of how you, and human nature at large, are at risk of falling prey to it – if we haven’t already. 

I took a psychology class on zombies & zombification a few years ago, where I learned the zombie’s Creole roots, its inaccurate representation in American films, how more than just Voudou gave birth to it. The zombie is a symbolic representation of a long, complex history of slavery, commodification, the decaying relationship between God and Man, transfiguration and human simulacra, from the Haitian revolution to the hyper-capitalist West of modern day. This article offers insight into “Haitian Zombies” and the colonial slavery at the root of them, as I do not want to disregard the racist history behind this terminology now heavily embedded into pop culture. This culture we have now, of forgotten etymology and horror, is one of a new kind of zombification, which I believe is most evident in our ravenous consumption, horde mentality, and government-propagated State of Exceptions. 

CONSUMPTION

George A. Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead left audiences terrified when it first premiered on the big screen – and not because of the blotchy face makeup or fake blood used on the zombies, but because of its clear condemnation of consumer culture. The first shopping complex was invented in 1956 and quickly became Americans’ favorite pastime by the seventies. What began as a means of convenience led to capitalistic engorgement; malls destroying the environment and enclosing shoppers between giant walls like wild animals at the zoo. Humans were meant to create, explore, converse with one another; gaze at the sky and label constellations incorrectly. It was the pursuit of trying that mattered. But malls ruined all that, taking our money, time, and political imagination with every mannequin dressed in cashmere mocking our imperfect flesh. People were promised better lives with every purchase (then we would achieve what the mannequins had!). We, the people, were aware of this falsity and bought into it anyway. 

Dawn of the Dead successfully confronted viewers with the consumerist culture they were partaking in through the caricature of shoppers as zombies. Mindlessly wandering through the empty mall, the gray-faced undead could only do what we choose to do now: consume. Romero’s film was celebrated but not heeded. He warned of what was to come: anything found liberating under capitalism is just as capable of imprisoning us. 

Shein had an estimated 88 million active shoppers in 2023, 17.3 million of which were in the U.S. Temu is forecasted to make $37 billion by the end of this year. Amazon acquires almost twelve million orders every day. The power of the mall has outgrown its own infrastructure, now flashing ads and promises of happiness for 25% off through our cell phones (231 million iPhones sold in 2023. Does yours make you feel happy?). Our need to consume, fueled by the fast-paced society we will never keep up with, can be met with one click. And another. And another. And now we don’t even have to shop to feast, we can scroll, like, watch, search, scroll, text, never call, screenshot, save, scroll. Catatonic and insatiable, we, like the zombie, know nothing beyond our primal need to sustain our unlives. What is it we’re looking for in each online purchase or night of doom scrolling? A quick hit of dopamine? Someone to befriend? It is not necessary to feast on flesh to be the gluttonous creatures we never hesitate to shoot in the movies. We have become what only our barrels used to see. 

HORDE MENTALITY 

We gather, at concerts and political rallies. Malls and grocery stores, churches and graveyards. Moths to the light, we attract towards only what we know. If what we know is God, our positive phototaxis takes place in Sunday morning worship, leather-bound devotions kept close to our (still) beating hearts. If we know rage, it’s the street we feel under our feet as we hold signs and march towards something else to believe in. We wear insignia to find each other: badges, cross necklaces, rainbow bracelets, red hats, neon green crop tops. Yes, we hoard and we horde. 

As the old maxim states, there is power in numbers – but what is that power used for? Or against? As explained by Zombie Apocalypse Monthly (who knew such a newsletter existed?), the concept of “ ‘mob mentality’ or ‘herd behavior’ often observed in humans may also manifest itself among zombies. It is plausible that these reanimated corpses, devoid of individuality or higher cognitive functions, tap into a collective consciousness, driving them to converge in large groups. The mindless synchronization of their movements and actions within a horde indicates the presence of an unexplained force compelling them to act as one.” A horde (or group) of zombies acts as one, thinks as one, kills and feasts as one. It is groupthink on steroids, this collective unconsciousness of the un-dead. The moment one is zombified, the “I” dies to become “We.” 

Think of unity. I guarantee you, citizen of the world, did not think of the world. In our cultural assimilation towards zombification, we have accepted division upon skin color, political ideologies, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and man-made borders. Our only common ground is ignorance, of each other and the humanness we once shared. It would be easy to point fingers and center the blame of our divided world onto one thing or person, but no such facileness exists in the context of cultural zombification. We have lost ourselves to divisiveness for many, many reasons.

I couldn't vote in the 2016 presidential election, but I watched voters in my hometown line up outside the ballot boxes on the local news. As I scrolled through each channel, the intentional parting of the red-and-blue sea became apparent to me. Red hats paired with t-shirts in the same bold color represented one set of American ideals, one that was predicated on patriarchal strength, greatness, and “Trumping That B*tch.” Mentions of emails and grabbing cats could be heard leaving the red zombies’ lips. And then there were the women in blue (mostly women anyway), who bedazzled hoodies and baseball caps with E6000 and rhinestones to announce their white feminism. “I’m With Her” read their coffee mugs, but I didn’t need to read them to know. The emblems of the blue zombies were less threatening than the red ones, but just as potent. 

In the coming months, when the results of this election changed the course of American politics forever, the hordes grew exponentially. I witnessed the erection of flags partaking in this new kind of bipartisanship in the lawns of houses I played in as a child; the fronts of restaurants that never so much as put the news on their TVs before 2016. Bodies became moving targets for demarcation, no longer just declaring allegiance to a particular cause, person, or set of ideals, but responding to those opposing them. It was no longer enough to celebrate queer allyship with a pin, one had to wear the rainbow pin AND another that proclaimed their hatred for anyone who doesn’t support what they support. Crocheted pink hats and Gadsden yellow appeared; so too did discursion rooted in falsities and scare tactics. The hivemind thrives off singularity. Anger, defending liberties that should have never been made governable, violence: the culmination of the zombified American spirit has never been clearer. Even if our bodies stay stagnant, it is our minds that are puppeteered by our chosen idols – our zombie masters in disguise. 

Think: are my beliefs truly mine, or are they someone else’s that I’ve been coaxed into accepting as my own? The horde disintegrates if what once was dead and complacent becomes alive.

  Trump rally, The New York Times

STATE OF EXCEPTIONS

In Netflix’s Bird Box, a suicide pandemic breaks out among every continent, eradicating people’s ability to look freely upon the world (lest their eyes meet the mystery source behind this suicide–sickness). Bodies step in front of semi-trucks, jump from buildings, crawl toward some silent voice in the flames of an intentional car crash. For all of human history, our one goal has been survival. The suicide pandemic created a new world order and reversed our primal instincts. We wanted to die. By shotgun or the sea, death was the answer. 

Those who averted their eyes from the madness hid. They banded together, using blindfolds and trust founded on nothing but knowing they only had each other to raid grocery stores; keep the curtains closed; kill the infected. Behind closed doors, they waited for mercy to come. With no God or government to lead them, it was up to the survivors to decide if certain people were worth saving. Sandra Bullock’s group argued over letting a pregnant woman into the house until the head honcho was knocked out by one of the members who wanted to let her in. Many others were turned away completely and later killed or infected by the virus. Being a woman or being pregnant was no longer enough to be saved. What made you an exception, a worthy person to be protected by the law before disaster, was now inconsequential. When the world falls, morality falls faster. 

The suicide pandemic in Bird Box created a “State of Emergency.” State of Emergencies occur when unprecedented tragedies – like war, natural disasters, or pandemics – create an upheaval of violence where people turn on each other. These often trigger a State of Exception, where certain groups of people fall beneath the law. When violence (caused by the State of Emergency) needs something to blame, scapegoats (issued by the State of Exception) become what the mob attacks and the law ignores. 

I believe our world (and I write this as a privileged 22-year-old American bearing witness to disaster instead of experiencing it, so please note that I am only speaking of the terror that I know and not of the unseen violence unfolding across the globe) has been in a dire State of Emergency for over half a decade. This is not to say that we have been subjected to intermittent emergencies over the past five years but, rather, that Emergency has become our statehood. Pandemics, broken death records, economic disasters, politically induced brutality, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, heat waves, workers’ strikes, subversive propaganda, and wars are 1) the crux of the proletariat’s demise and the bourgeoisie's ability to shield themselves behind the government’s use of biopower (utilizing death as a means to sustain the lives of others) and 2) the nexus of our cultural zombification. To become desensitized to the unprecedented tragedies propelling the State of Emergency is to accept the subsequent State of Exception as natural; as the law that disregards lives as equal. 

COVID-19. State of (n95 masks, respirators, giant cotton swabs) Emergency. Every citizen of The United States fell beneath international health laws when no warning was given after the initial discovery of the virus. A miscommunication or severe underestimation, perhaps. But the deaths of the very old, very young, and immunocompromised showed what it really was: a grave mistake allowing a State of Exception to be born. 

Hurricane Sandy, Maria, Harvey, Michael, Helene. State of (rubble, missing sisters, streets as rivers) Emergency. If you couldn’t evacuate, there was no safe place to go. No government around to save you. 

The Middle East, 2024. State of (death, death, so much death, despair, heartbreak) Emergency. I do not need to make obvious which lives fall beneath the law. Look at the casualties. They will tell you. Look at history. It will tell you. 

Those of us watching. State of (zombified) acceptance. 

Index and middle finger to the side of your neck, just beneath your jaw. Can you feel it? Proof of being alive? Zombies don’t carry such a pulse. So what, then, to make of our culture’s depravity, of our apathy towards the world and lack of interest in it? How does one become un-zombified? 

In the 2018 zombie apocalypse film The Night Eats The World, the main protagonist and one of the sole survivors of Paris’ zombie epidemic, Sam, comes to this stark realization: “Dead is the norm now. I’m the one who’s not normal.” Apathy dies where actualization begins. Zombies are not aware of their own ravenous consumption, horde mentality, or the forces that delegate catastrophic State of Exceptions. They only know their own hunger – but not consciously; not of their participation in the act but only of the act itself. Once you are bitten, you are only capable of biting. Once you are bought, you are only capable of buying. Un-living.

I check my pulse: 75 beats per minute, and I am all too aware of my own desire to not be our apathetic normal. Flesh can be warm. It can also be eaten. Act like you’re made of flesh, because you are. 

Night Eats The World.