Current mood:

enthralled

Zombie Survival (and Disasters)
Well, I would point out that there are ignorant people out there. I mean sure, most people are at least familiar with concepts like Zombies and Horror movies, but then there are families who bring their children up in a very sheltered way (with or without religion) where things like horror might have been forbidden.

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*That* said, keep in mind also that the biggest thing that kills people in emergencies is the modern desire to treat everything with disbelief. If there is a fire, before people react they want to actually see the fire for example. Part of it is a desire not to be taken advantage of or "punk'd" so to speak.

On top of that highly individualistic societies like the one in the US, tend to raise people to believe that they are 'special' even from their earliest cognitive thoughts. This means that in an emergency people always think that their needs are paramount. In a casino for example during the rare sectional evacuations (serious fire, or a terrorist threat that has to be taken seriously even if it's not real) people do not want to leave slot machines, abandon their chips, or leave without locating other members of their party.

Indeed the evacuation plan for the casino has dealers and table games people cashing everyone out before evacuation which basically means that in a REAL emergency of huge level people would die left and right, since they wrote the policies assuming any alarm is a false one and figuring if it's not the insurance would cover the massive damages/loss of life. Being a false alarm it's better to avoid the inevitable lawsuits and people claiming "OMG half my chips are missing" when they come back or whatever.

On top of that there is the sheer idiocy of evacuating the old and handicapped, oftentimes first. Politically incorrect? Well given the situation it's occurred to me that in the time and personal attention it takes to evacuate one of these people you could have saved dozens. Given the "fun" in false alarms, all I can think to an extent is that thank god they eventually decided to go with some federal laws that allow you to dump them in stairwells (arguably the most structurally sound part of the building) but my god you've never seen people get so upset. What's worse is the people like that who refuse to cooperate with security until they find a caregiver/family member as that is oftentimes 10x worse than just trying to get a regular party together.

So basically going with my experiences, crisis = tons of dead people.

If I was writing federal/business guidelines I'd remove the ability of people to perform lawsuits from situations incurred during an evacuation (false alarm or not), and allow rescuers in most cases to perform the equivalent of a triage and abandon people that would take the most work until last. Some places might allow this, but my experiences have led me to believe most don't. Indeed it seems the whole "handicapped first" thing is almost a universal practice and it's been claimed it's in the law.

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The above rant aside (the inabillity to save people in a practical sense), I will also point out that too much knowlege of fantasy and horror and such can also lead to the seemingly glaring "what are they" comment.

See, in horror there are plenty of differant kinds of zombie-like creatures that follow the same genere. You've got several differant takes on possesed people that use the same idea (Demons, Evil Dead), your basic cannibal mutant guys (like CHUDs to some extent), and other similar things. Not to mention whacked out concepts like John Carpenter's "Ghosts Of Mars" or the "Critters" series (this last one being very un-zombie like)

Head Shots, Dismemberment, true bordeline invulnerability, do they possess people if they go down? Yes it takes a true oddball to think of all these possibilities based on fiction but just think about it. If I ran into someone with more experience in a situation like this I'd probably ask the same "what are they" question albiet with some eventual clarification.

This is also incidently while when watching zombie movies I realize your supposed to get freaked out by the evil of humanity when you occasionally see people performing Mengele-like experiments on Zombies, but honestly when I'm fighting something like this in a war of extinction, any information gathered is useful. If I'm killing Zombies, or hordes of the hopelessly possesed, I'm not going to be worrying about moral and humane rules of engagement.

Though honestly I imagine if it really came about someone would probably eventually think of such a thing. "Yes, we must destroy the legions of the walking dead/damned, but do so with dignity for they were once people". Followed by people burning the equivilent of the Reapers Survival guide and drafting a new equivilent of the Geneva convention.

Especially in this country we definitely seem that stupid at times.