More ‘Don’t Use the Zed Word’ Hijinks
Really, people, just stop it:
Let’s not turn our kids into fear-filled zombies!
By Scott Sager
for The Brooklyn PaperDid you hear the one about the boys attacked by a big, brown bear in Alaska? No joke, true story. Just a couple of weeks ago, a group of boys on a wilderness learning trip encountered a bear and her cub, and four of them were mauled.
My 16-year-old daughter could have been there. She was on a similar adventure trip in the middle of nowhere. She made it home safely, had a great trip and is eager to head out the door on her next adventure.
That’s it, the sole mention of Zombies in the entire piece is in the title, not as a group of people with a different Vitality Status, nor even as caricatured monsters from fiction. The author merely needed a ‘bad word’ to use for people averse to risk.
He affirms, without mentioning the Differently Animated directly, this interpretation later in the piece:
Should I lock my girls away from the world? Of course not. Should I constantly remind them of the dangers surrounding them and insist on their protection and safety? Not if it would simply turn them into frightened, timid, boring creatures that look like my daughters.
Frightened, timid and boring? I’ve heard a lot of insults to Zombiedom in my day, believe me, but this is new.
For the last time, mainstream press, STOP using ‘Zombie’ as a lazy synonym for ‘Thing I Do Not Like’! It just makes you look like a bunch of semi-literate, bigoted, Living Supremacist hacks.
Which, granted, you might well be. For shame.
About The Author
I think Sager was using a subtler definition than you found, one based on the real-world zombies as scientifically investigated. To me, what he wrote meant “Don’t turn our kids into fear-filled entities who, because of that induced fear, have only one way to behave–unthinkingly.” The classic zombie is a person who has no will of his own. The “frightened, timid, boring creatures” would not be classic movie monster zombies, they would be the unthinking living beings reacting only to conditioned responses.
Classic zombies are not the movie monster sort, they simply are mindless in the sense that they only do what they are ordered to do; they never attack on their own.
It has happened that a classic Haitian “zombie” managed to escape the drug-induced inability to refuse an order, but his culture had left no place for him to return to.
Even if one is to assume that’s what the author meant, it’s demeaning both to the Zombies and to the children in question. I think it rather underplays the trauma of being drugged and hypnotized into slavery to compare it with overzealous parenting. Likewise, I think assuming a timid child is akin to a brainwashed victim is also unfair.
Regardless, the ZRC contests the notion this is an appropriate use of the term or a properly sensitive way to discuss, even incidentally, an oppressed minority population.