TWD, Survival Rule Of The Week: What you DON’T need from yourself

6) Ignorance

Now, when I say “ignorance,” I don’t mean “failure to realize something,” but rather willful ignorance, as in knowing that something is out of place, or just plain wrong, and acting as if it isn’t. These are two very different things, especially in a zombie apocalypse; Both are dangerous, but only the former is in any way excusable.

Though I hate to do it, I think one of the best examples of this in The Walking Dead was Hershel. When Rick’s group first met Hershel, he collected the walkers of his family, friends, and neighbors and put them in his barn, keeping them fed with chickens.

The thing is, Hershel was, while not a human doctor, a veterinarian, and as such, he had to know on some level that no matter how sick a person was, gray is an unnatural color for them to be. He had to have known that their behavior, their smell, their unnatural skin color, just the overall state they were in, was not simply the signs of them being ill, but of them being dead. I think it was just that he couldn’t bring himself to put down his neighbors, his friends, his son, or his wife, and so, he let himself believe they were just sick and keep them around a little longer.

While Hershel’s behavior is understandable, that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

In a zombie apocalypse, you can’t just pretend that the chaos and carnage going on around you isn’t happening. You can’t pretend that the zombies are just going to “get better” and that everything will go back to normal; that’s just naive. You need to look at the situation you’re in and accept it for what it is; That’s the only way you can deal with it.

If you just dig your head in the sand and try to ignore the dangers going on around you, by the time you pull your head back out, it will be too late to do anything about it.