The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Best Of A Bad Situation

You Shouldn’t Just Accept A Bad Situation If It Could Be Better.

One of the subplots of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead was Princess opting to leave the Commonwealth (And, in the process, end her relationship with the leader of its army, Michael Mercer) because she was angry at how Governor Pamela Milton was railroading Eugene for the death of her son, Sebastian.

When she confronted Mercer about this injustice, and his complicity in it (Owing to being told by Pamela that Eugene’s arrest would spare the life of Mercer’s sister, Max), he told her that, as bad as the situation in the Commonwealth had gotten, “it could be worse”.

This garnered a strong negative reaction from Princess, recalling her poor living conditions as a child, wherein she suffered abuse at the hands of her stepfather and stepbrother, but because her stepfather was providing for her and her mother, she was told to accept it because “Things could be worse”.

For her, that attitude was simply unacceptable because, as she was well aware, it could be used to gloss over a lot of repugnant behavior.

Now, you might think this contradicts my last entry, but it doesn’t, and I’ll explain why: While I do believe you can’t expect perfection from your group or community, especially in a zombie apocalypse, I also believe that if you know things can be better or can be made better, you shouldn’t just accept a bad situation because it’s better than what’s outside. You should try to make things better if and whenever possible.

The reason why is simple: If you start accepting something bad, knowing it could be made better because something else could be worse, where does the line get drawn? How far are you willing to let the bad get you before you finally decide it’s too much, and when you do come to that decision, will there be anything left to save? Or will that window have already closed?

Ben Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices liberty for security will lose both and deserves neither.” In a zombie apocalypse, if you accept too much bad for a little good, you will one day find there is no more good, and the bad is too strong to overcome. You will have lost the latter, and by not stopping it when you could have, reward yourself with the former. Do not accept a bad situation if you don’t have to.

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! A zombie apocalypse will be an awful thing to go through, and what little good we find in it, we should cherish and be thankful for it. We can’t expect perfection and should appreciate the fact that things could be worse, but we also shouldn’t accept worse if we have the ability to make it better. If you want to know more about how to make things better in the apocalypse, why not pick up my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, and on iTunes here!