The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: People suck

1) People are ignorant.

Let’s be clear here, right off the bat: I’m not using ignorant to mean “stupid” (I have too big of a rant for that to lump it in here), I’m using it to mean “Literally unaware of a threat staring them in the face”, though, I can see where the latter can be confused with the former.

There, now that we got that out of the way, we can begin.

There is a sad fact about our species: We have a tremendous capacity for ignorance (We have a tremendous capacity for a lot of things, ignorance is but one of them…). Large groups of people can and will happily ignore a huge problem staring them in the face if they think it’s too difficult to tackle, and, a zombie apocalypse is one of them.

Think about Alexandria in The Walking Dead. Even though they knew they were in a zombie apocalypse (Hell, it’s pretty much the reason the community was established in the first place) they went around acting like nothing was wrong. In fact, they were so dedicated to blocking out the world around them that they weren’t, in any way, concerned about the relatively small number of walkers they’d been dealing with up to that point, in spite of the fact that they were only a stone’s throw from Washington D.C., which, because of the government’s orders, would have swelled to millions of people, most of whom (It could easily be assumed) had been turned into walkers. They were only a few miles away, and yet, saw only trickles of walkers.

Did they think they had just gotten lucky?! If they had been paying attention, they would have sent Aaron or Eric, or somebody out to scout around and at least see where there might have been herds of walkers, just to figure out where not to go, but, because it wasn’t bothering them, they just figured “Out of sight, out of mind”.

Why am I saying all of this?

Because, when the apocalypse begins, it won’t exactly start with a million zombies marching down the streets of New York or something like that, but, it will start with a small number of people acting in increasingly weird ways — A person staggering around incoherently here, a person savagely biting a cop there, yet another person shaking off getting shot, etc. — and you will watch as either the media will ignore it (Which means no one else will hear about it) or the population at large will simply treat these incidents as isolated, rather than a warning to take precautions.

I’ll give the governments of the world a little credit — It’s one thing we can thank coronavirus for, I suppose — if they see enough incidents of this nature, they might attempt to take action, even if clandestinely, but, whether it’ll be enough, I can’t predict.

Other than that, though, if you’re wondering why people are just letting a zombie outbreak occur right under their noses, this is why and, once zombies emerge, if you’re expecting everyone to wake up to the problem before it becomes a disaster…don’t hold your breath.