It Isn’t Personal

My relationship with Zombies is fraught with ambivalence. I detest those mindless, brain-eating, former humans, but my distaste for them isn’t personal. They, in turn, threaten, maim, and murder the remnants of humanity because it is what they are compelled to do. Their mayhem isn’t personal. They are driven by a T-virus, or a Z-virus, or perhaps a cordyceps fungus. Whatever compels them to destroy us is not about us; it isn’t personal.

Some Zombies seem to be driven to eat brains – human brains, to be precise. I have eaten calf brains and kid goat brains. They are edible, but I do not seek them out. They consist largely of sphingolipids – slimy with a stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth texture that I find unpleasant. Still, some of my relatives born at the turn of the 20th century loved that organ meat; not me. Brains are for Zombies. Give me tongue. Give me cheek meat. Give me tripe. Keep the damn brains!

I think that this is one of the reasons that I find war, real, imagined or on the screen, so troubling. It isn’t personal. The bombardier who drops a lethal payload over an area populated by innocent civilians is performing a task, a function of war, the death and suffering that ensue from that action are not personal to the bombardier. I am left to wonder whether indifference has some antiseptic property that sanitizes inhumanity and atrocity. “I’m sorry that we have to fire this missile at your apartment building or that we have to herd your entire family into this trench so that we can kill all of you. We’re just following orders. It really isn’t personal.” I wonder whether Hannah Arendt contemplated indifference as an element of the banality of evil.

In my brief life, I have experienced the strongest of human emotions – love and anger. Both are deeply personal to me, but I think that hate is less so. Hate requires a lack of regard. It contemplates retribution without regret. I think that it isn’t personal.

Did I mention that my relationship with Zombies is fraught with ambivalence?