Racist Teabaggers are as close to zombies as we'll ever get.
Zombies aren't real. Dead humans don't come back to life and seek the flesh of living humans. It's a myth, about as real as Godzilla.
But a human being, steeped in hatred, living in hatred, dreaming the sick dreams that only tortured souls can dream -- they are among us.
Can you see inside the mind of a racist? It's like living in a Tim Burton nightmare, full of painted wooden people dancing behind ragged curtains, smelling of offal, treasuring boxes full of disease, guarding basements full of gassed World War One corpses. It is Empty. It is dull, and cold, and rotting, and tastes of hot metal. After all this time, all these things that have happened to us, to the people of our earth -- some humans still carry forward the ancient viruses from thirty million years of evolution, the shapes that lurk around the edges of our lamp-lit villages, calling us back to things that only our ancestral memories recall, packed away in the layers of dust that our ancestors became.
They walk among us, as carriers of darkness, living half-lives, forever asleep -- only the animal thinks for them anymore, the cell, the muscle, the darkened nerve. They are gone. Perhaps one in ten thousand will awaken, through trauma, or patient love that only one in a million of the living bear, and will extend to them. All of the others will stumble forward through life, boiling inside, tearing at the living, desperately striving to darken the light for all the long years of their life.
There are things worse than bloodless creatures hungry for flesh. Gray lives lived without reason, without thought, like mechanical dolls spouting lines from an endless loop of tape.
If they were zombies, we could grab some guns and ammo, and hide out in the mall until the food runs out, try to make a break for it to some country paradise where the zombies don't reach. Wait them out.
But racists aren't zombies. They're citizens. Neighbors. Co-workers. The guy who shipped your recent Ebay trinket to you. A few bad cops, bad judges, bad teachers, bad lawyers. You could live your whole life next to one and not realize it until the critical moment arrives when, to your shock, they are revealed. You thought they were just like you. Everyone's seen the same movies, right? Read the books, participated in the classroom discussions, heard the same shining words of that beautiful Constitution of ours whose meaning always seemed so clear to you, made brilliant by the blood of the Kennedys and King, of course everyone knows the truth, by now, after all this time --
But They walk among us. Dead to reason. Dead to the love of the world, of beauty, dead to the meaning of those incredible stars in the sky. Hungry to bring pain to brighter human souls. Spreading the virus anyway they can, like deadheaded alien-hosts, or parasites that wear shells to allow them to get closer to their victims. Shuffling forward, for all their long lives, seeking prey.
As close to zombies as we'll ever get.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Excellent piece of writing.
And it's wonderfully convenient way to dehumanize people.
http://www.hornady.com/ammunition/zombiemax
