Stories like this are what makes it all worthwhile for the ZRC:

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest gathering of zombies ever was held on October 30, 2010 when 4,093 participants gathered on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
But on October 15 of this year, more than 20,000 zombies descended on downtown Fort Myers for ZOMBICON 2011, unofficially shattering the world record.

…

In the meantime, other records were broken on the night of ZOMBICON, which were easier to prove. According to Eric Olsen, manager of the World Famous Cigar Bar, “In 15 years downtown, we had our best night ever.” Many other downtown bars and restaurants also reported record numbers. Gloria Bonventre, head of the Lee Memorial Blood Center, confirmed that 128 units of blood were donated, which have the potential of saving up to 256 lives.

This is more than three times the number from the previous year, a record for the most blood collected at a special event. And for the first time, the Renal Transplant Center and the “Be The Match” bone marrow registry recruited donors at the event. Also, a record 3,786 pounds of food was gathered for The Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, the most ever collected at a nighttime event.

This. This right here is precisely the sort of fantastic, civic-minded, open-hearted (even if some of them aren’t beating) face-to-face social activism we at the Zombie Rights Campaign love to see. Creating an open and welcoming space for Zombies to interact with the Living while collecting food, blood and tissue donors as a gesture of goodwill and positive outreach? Can it get any better?

Hopefully this event, once it goes down in the record books, can help to put an end once and for all to the paranoid delusions of the Brooks/Kirkman/Zombie Apocalypse crowd, who are just *so sure* that any large gathering of the Undead will lead to certain doom.

In fact, as it so happens, it can lead to donated blood, food, and (presumably) Living people signing up to donate bone marrow if called upon to do so.

For the record, I am signed up for that very same registry; they’ve yet to ask me for any delicious bone juices, but I’ll let you know if it happens.

I’d love to see bone marrow registration become one of the big associated causes of the Zombie Rights Movement too. We do cancer research fundraising here at the ZRC, but bone marrow’s also a great idea.

Should try to cook something up for that.

In the meantime, many thanks and much praise to Fort Myers for this fantastic event and outing for the Zombie as well as Living Communities.

Tags: Zombie Public Event, Zombies Doing Good

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, January 1st, 2012 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.