The ongoing outbreaks of individual madness/cannibalism in North America are being mocked as a “zombie outbreak,” but there's nothing the least bit funny about it.
As the economy and country continue to spiral, these desperate acts embody just how far we're slipping, whether from hunger (the July 2010 Los Angeles account of a homeless woman seizing and biting a baby's arm) or the conflation of drug abuse/insanity (the infamous Florida attack and killing in May).
We've tolerated a succession of Hunger Belts in America for a full generation now. Such attacks are also a result of absolutely no form of safety net left for those at the real bottom.
No social services. No health care (much less “care” for the mentally ill and/or addicts, whose ranks swell as the nation declines. No social contract left that's even vaguely Christian in nature (in which one does care for one's brother and sister, especially those in need).
We call ourselves a Christian nation? We're not. We've so abandoned anything remotely aligned with those values, via our collective demonization of caring - you know, basically, caring - as a malignancy in and of itself.
In broader economic terms: We will never recover financially, as a country, because we are no longer competitive with all other industrial nations on Earth.
In short, all other industrial nations take care of their citizens' health. We never will, apparently, because we have convinced ourselves “for-profit health care” is somehow viable, sustainable, and essential. We will forever remain noncompetitive as long as we're in this crazy ideological deadlock over health care.
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The corporate-funded Right is at a conceptual conundrum breakpoint. Corporations realize they've boxed themselves into a corner now by demonizing “health care” as “socialism,” while making the entire United States essentially incompatible and non-competitive with all other industrial nations, all the while successfully mounting a rabid “anti-union” generation that is also increasingly unemployed and impoverished.
The inherent contradictions and self-defeating end game sure looks close at hand.
So, how do we sustain jingoistic corporate-funded rabid “patriotism” that “we're the greatest nation on Earth” while the same corporate powers bleed us dry, with more of our remaining national “wealth” in the hands of individuals necessarily poured into a failed, for-profit “health care system” that bleeds every patient dry before disposing of their carcasses?
At what point do the corporate powers either declare “victory” by convincing all Americans they are effectively slave labor, to be paid next to nothing (pay/salaries have been flatlined for ever two decades while worker productivity and corporate profits have soared), because Americans have “failed” to fulfill the obligations of a consumer class?
We're damn near that endpoint by the math alone.
And we're damn near that endpoint with every joke about real-life desperation, madness, and personal apocalypse fueling “zombie” fantasies and ridicule.