Hope, Love and Strategy in the Time of the Zombie Apocalypse
Sunday, 14 April 2013 06:38By Stephen Lerner, Truthout | Op-Ed
Zombie protesters at Occupy Wall Street, October 3, 2011. (Photo: WarmSleepy)The world is definitely having "a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day."
Add it up: super storms, droughts, war, massive unemployment, global government gridlock and resurgent nativism, along with myriad other horrors and catastrophes.
Surviving the coming end of the world, Armageddon, and/or Zombie Apocalypse is where many conversations go these days. Easier to wrap our heads around how to kill an apocalyptical zombie (it is critical to destroy the brain) rather than how to defeat a real-world, hydra-headed corporation that's considered a person; or break up a vampire squid bank that's too big to fail or jail.
I'm an optimist. I live and thrive on hope and possibility. And I increasingly feel like the odd person out. Union meetings, and other gatherings of progressives committed to economic equality and social justice often take on the tenor of a death cult. First we recite the mantra of our lost clout, power, membership - insert your favorite example of decline. Then, in a fit of fantasy, someone invariably weds nostalgia and bad history, giving birth to the notion that our best hope for the future is in trying to recapture an idealized version of a past that never existed.
Recently, I was with friends who were talking about where and how we would live after the apocalypse – a world similar to the one described in Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower. In addition to a defensible property, up on a hill (ideally with a freshwater source), my friends then listed what skill they each would bring to our band of post-apocalypse Zombie slayers. Turns out, mine is a fairly talented group of friends. We had a carpenter, someone who could make fishing nets out of old clothes, a gun enthusiast and a couple of gardeners who could grow vegetables - the beginnings of a progressive survivalist collective.
I touted my skills, but my friends were unimpressed that I could write political manifestos and polemics. My pretty good record of organizing in the Justice for Janitors and other union campaigns didn't seem that useful either. It soon became clear there was not a role for me in the post-apocalypse world, at least not based on my current skill set.
I realized I faced a choice. I could learn how to hunt, shoot, farm and build anti-zombie fortifications based on an analysis that it was best to prepare for the end of the world. Or I could double down on the crazy, improbable notion that the very things threatening the world create the opportunity to save it. This may be the time of greatest opportunity in recent history to win transformational change precisely because the economic, environmental and political systems as currently constructed are unsustainable.
So here is the paradox: It is not an exaggeration to say "the end is near" - climate change and global warming truly threaten the existence of humanity. Growing corporate consolidation, increasing inequality and the spiraling decline of unions threaten not just our standard of living, but democracy itself. And the radical right really does want to disenfranchise people of color, control women's bodies and deport everyone who doesn't agree. But predicting, repeating, telling, yelling and proving through charts, reports and statistics that the "end is near" doesn't motivate people to act. It does the opposite - it overwhelms, numbs and shuts people down.
If we want people to organize and fight back, not shut down and curl up, what do we do? What keeps a hopeful person from going nuts in a crazy world? How do we seize opportunity, and develop tactics that give heft to our hope? How are we not only optimistic but also strategic? And how do we move off of losing defensive fights and into winning offensive ones?
The Missing Link ideology (without the isms)?
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