Zombies = Politicians

I have to admit it; I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead. It is one of the few shows on TV that I find to be well written while taking an implausible premise and making it believable. It showcases the human condition when normal people are thrown into extreme circumstances that are beyond their comprehension.

The two main groups of characters are as follows:
Zombies: Unthinking automatons that wander the earth consuming everything in their path with no consideration for the consequences and no concern for who gets hurt by their actions. If they are in a group, they mill around aimlessly until something alive shows up, whereupon they kill and consume it. They move into an area, and that area is immediately uninhabitable by normal people. Though they bear some resemblance to people, the truth is that they have nothing in common with those that are alive and trying to make their way. And they smell bad.

Survivors: Confounded by how this situation came about, they try their best to survive in an increasingly hostile world, in which they are hopelessly out numbereed. They seize what few moments of joy they can while having to deal with the stress of day-to-day living and all of the baggage that comes with human interaction. They seek to salvage what is left of a devastated world, and carve out some sort of security while knowing that there is no way they can halt the teeming masses of mindless consumers. The one bright spot is that they are heavily armed and are learning that, to survive, you have to do the hard, dirty, work of eliminating your enemy without remorse.

If it were up to me, I would force every politician to sit and watch every episode, and learn from those people that are trying to survive. The lesson that I would want them to learn is this: When your entire existence is based on roaming around and looking for resources and lives to take from those who have based their lives around trying to build some semblance of security for themselves, you run the risk of forcing those people to do whatever grisly, horrible, task they deem necessary to preserve it. And once you have crossed the line from nuisance to threat, you may find yourselves facing a group of people that are angry, scared, desperate, and heavily armed.

So far in the series, there have been no allies of the zombies. No Quislings have surrendered their people to the zombies in the hopes of being the last to be eaten. The same cannot be said of politicians. Whether it be the useful idiots of Occupy Something That Creates a Nuisance, or the fat cats that sidle up to the Washington DC trough for another mouthful of spending pork, all politicians have their allies. Those allies, whether by circumstance or intent, are arrayed against those of us that are trying to get by.

The heart of the matter is this; do not count on politicians to fix the things in this country that need fixing because, for them, they are not broken. For them, our crisis is an opportunity to seize more money, power, and influence. H.L. Mencken said it best, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Once you understand that, once you realize that all of the 'benefits' of government come with a price tag that far exceeds its value, you will begin to understand that the "Us versus Them" paradigm isn't  about the "haves" and "have nots" or "Republicans" versus "Democrats"; it's about "those that want to earn their way to prosperity, raise their children to do better than they did, leave the world a little better than they found it, and generally be left alone to do these things in peace" versus "those that envy the first group, see them as undeserving of what they have, and are actively seeking ways to wrest it from them and control their lives."

We are coming to a point in history where we are all going to have to decide the group to which we want to belong, and act accordingly. Which reminds me, I have to go reload some ammo and sharpen my parang.