The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Everyone has worth

There was a pretty good message in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead and it was nice and simple: In a zombie apocalypse, EVERYONE has worth.

You know what there’s going to be a lot of in a zombie apocalypse? Dead people. Walking around, rotting on the ground, everywhere.

You know what that means? It means that the rest of us who are still going will be precious. The person who can take people for granted is a fool.

As we have to learn to survive, and hopefully thrive, in a world with zombies, we need to realize that people are not disposable. Each of us has something to contribute to society, especially a society in which there are relatively few of us.

For example, let’s start with the letter Carl wrote to Rick. In it, Carl asks his dad to try to reach a peace with The Saviors.

His hope was that Rick and the others would be able to work toward a mutual future with The Saviors, where no one had to worry about being killed anymore.

The point he was trying to make was that every life had worth (Hence the name of Sunday’s episode), that it wasn’t something cheap and expendable.

To illustrate the point, let’s look at the opposite end of that spectrum. What kind of people do we become when we don’t value human life?

I know I probably bring it up a lot, but, it’s important. Think of all the worst atrocities and evils committed throughout history. Those sprang up out of people not seeing others as people. When you dehumanize someone — Deem them of no value — it’s becomes frighteningly easy to do despicable things to them.

I suppose I can answer my own question, then: When we don’t value human life…we become monsters.

I could probably just leave this off right there, but, that would be leaving a lot of this topic off the table.

As important as it is for people to realize that people do have value, it’s equally important for us to realize our own value, even if especially if others don’t recognize it.

Let’s use Eugene for example.

I honestly think (And will discuss this in a The Walking Dead Theory later this week) nobody understands Eugene’s devotion to minimizing deaths, and the lengths he’ll go to assure that.

I won’t go into too much detail, but, while Rosita basically said Eugene had rarely done anything useful, I’d argue that nobody has seen just how useful he can be. I think Eugene will end this season doing something extremely useful, and it will hinge on certain people (I’ll let you guys figure out who) not noticing it. To borrow a quote from Futurama: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

The point is: We need to be able to recognize our value to this world. Even if people don’t notice it at first, it’s important that we know it.

The other side of that coin is recognizing the value in others, even if they don’t notice it.

In spite of his fear of dying, Father Gabriel tried to sabotage bullets he made for The Saviors. He was willing to risk his life to do something to save his community.

After being found out by Eugene, poor Father Gabriel felt pretty down, believing he was no better than the coward he was when the outbreak began.

Yet, I don’t think Gabriel is that useless. After all, it takes something to be able to intentionally sabotage bullets. Something tells me that Gabriel’s skill is not lost on people, even if he thinks he’s nothing more than a coward. Sometimes, we don’t recognize our own worth until someone else shows it to us.

A zombie apocalypse will be a factory of death. In such an environment, it becomes important to realize how precious a human life can be. We have skills others don’t see. Hell, we may have skills that we don’t see! Each of us has something to contribute. Each of us has worth.

Now, if only we didn’t need a zombie apocalypse to realize all of that. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Next: The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Saving people

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it will help you should you ever need it and give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!