They just had an article on the TV news about something I had heard of directly from a few people who have been traveling on the roads recently, that is, people speeding like crazy on the highways, in some cases up to 150 mph or more, and even some idiots crashing ATVs, four-wheelers, doing side-by-side wheelies down the previously always crowded streets of Washington DC.
For the sake of discussion I won’t spend much time with the most obvious question here, the one that the TV presentation pointedly didn’t ask, that being: where the hell are the police? Yeah, I fully understand, we’ve been told it a million times but very few internalize it, that they “can’t be everywhere”… but they’ve still got to be SOMEWHERE. It’s not obvious that their workload has exactly exploded in a time where all the bars, honky-tonks, restaurants, stores and anything else the government doesn’t consider “essential” have been shuttered, so, without that normal workload… what are they enforcing, and where?
I can’t answer that. However, the question I really want to tackle is, where have we seen these scenes before?
A little reflection shows that, besides the vague but faintly haunting similarities to a million pop-culture zombie plague scenarios, we’re now getting deep into Mad Max territory here.
Okay, I admit haven’t seen the latest politically-correct feminist version of Mad Max, in which I hear the title character is basically reduced to a minor role in what is nominally his own story, a helpless hood-ornament to the baddies in need of rescue, but the theme of a post-apocalypse future where the streets and highways have become a free-for-all and police presence is either drastically reduced or entirely absent has been a common one in popular culture for a long time (and a fun way for the culture to demonize motorcyclists, who are and have always been a small enough minority to be fair game). Of course, such “fantasy” has been widely dismissed and derided by all of those very knowledgeable persons who “knew better”. We know who these persons are because they never tire of telling us they “knew better”… after the fact, and only until what they “knew” is suddenly not true anymore.
Aside from the ignored but pretty blatant fact that much of the world we live in, perhaps most of it, was predicted by the Cyberpunk genre of Science Fiction, even the far more common post-apocalyptic fiction is turning out to be very prophetic. Those least surprised by these developments are those who paid attention to those genres despite the scoffing.
I personally have mixed feelings about the whole fictional zombie-apocalypse thing, but I’ve always thought that it had value. Yes, it can get very silly, and since the more detailed the explanations the sillier it all gets those taking it too seriously can get very silly too. Still, its ever-increasing popularity shows that it has filled some real need in the populace. I strongly suspect that it has evolved as a more-or-less fantasy way for people to explore some very dark and real possibilities of things going very wrong in a future that people are understandably uncomfortable discussing or even seriously considering in their own minds. It’s a cultural “thought experiment”, a way for us to consider worst-case scenarios from a safe distance as non-serious entertainment without being forced to confront every unpleasant aspect of them. The fact that a large portion of a populace feels a real need to consider such possibilities doesn’t make it comfortable for them, and brainstorming it as a fictional scenario helps to feed that perceived need.
I’ve got a feeling that blind faith in the government to protect us in all cases is going to become a lot less popular. I have joked that the current crisis has to blow over quickly so everyone can go back to ridiculing peppers. Somewhat to my surprise that isn’t happening, despite their being a hard kernel of truth in the joke.
So… up until recently people, especially young people, were able to ignore the lessons of 9-11, the lessons of Katrina and dozens of other mini-disasters simply because it didn’t happen to THEM.
Well, guess what? We’ve just started a huge social experiment to see what happens when an unexpected disaster effects EVERYBODY. As a culture we haven’t had time to internalize all this, adjust to the new reality and decide our individual approaches going forward, but… I think its a pretty safe bet that we’re going to be seeing widespread changes in attitude. We’ve transcended the limiting social impact factors that have kept localized disasters from becoming nationwide learning experiences, now we’ve gone beyond those directly affected and those able to learn from the experience of others, and we’ve provided a lesson even to those who have not been personally affected before, and can only learn from their own personal experiences. That turns out to be a dishearteningly huge segment of the population.
To be blunt, the ones ridiculing those who make reasonable preparations for possible bad times from now on are likely to be only the stupidest of the stupid. That sort of thing builds on itself, positions that attract obviously-not-too-bright people, like the Flat Earthers, tend to become unfashionable. I’m guessing that ridiculing people who are prepared is going to become less popular, and doing at least moderately more to be prepared is going to become more mainstream.
— Robert the Wombat