“Zombies are all the rage now: fast zombies, slow zombies, aimless zombies, aggressive blood-spitting zombies, classic supernatural zombies, pathogenic airborne zombies, Jane Austen zombies, Lewis Carroll zombies, White Zombies, Cranberry zombies; zombie survival guides, zombie self-defense manuals, zombie architectural schools—zombies, zombies, zombies. Poor things: mindless, purposeless and hideously contagious. If one more serious person says, ‘zombie apocalypse…’ ”

“The Secret Correspondence of Loon and Fiasco,” Mayapple Press 2014

People are albatrosses around the neck of our own existence. We insist on annoying needs, like health care and wages; businesses should be run with as few of us as possible. We strangle ourselves, breathing, on our own carbon dioxide. We die--locally, or in far-off places--in dozens, in hundreds and thousands, but there are still more, on streets and subways and buses, everywhere you look. Most of us are superfluous to each other; we’ll never meet, we’ll never serve any direct, obvious interdependent function. Some of us simply have to be extra, extraneous. And our young are the worst: so helpless, so expensive, their schooling, why pay for it? Their error, to have been brought here, so many, when so few are genuinely needed.

I read science fiction, now, to remember the human. To feel--in this time of layoffs, austerity, shrunken education and social service budgets, shrunken everything--that human beings are valuable, some sort of rarity, something worth safeguarding, versus just wishing away. I liked Hugh Howey’s Wool, liked it a lot, if for no other reason that children were born there by lottery, each one to replace a corresponding death, there in those canisters, “silos,” under the soil. And thus, something precious, celebrated--something the collective group was eager, impassioned, to foster.

We don’t seem to need children any more, or to want them, not as a whole, as cities or nations or societies. They cost too much, they leave less for us, there is too much competition. It would be good to take the best of them, the Ivy Leaguers, fund some selective schools, but the rest of them, the ordinary? “Donne because we are too menny.” The rank and file, no thank you, no.

In zombie movies, when there is hardly anybody left, everybody still matters. My fourth-rate, fourth-grade archery skills--I’d like to think--might still make me valuable, if we were down to a group of five or six. How easy it becomes, to cling to the random remainders--the bodega clerk, the ex-con without a family, the sharp-mouthed grandma, the adolescent wise beyond her years. We suddenly have so much in common--a common loss, a common future. And all because we aren’t cyborg or mutant or fatally infected.

We aren’t alien, not anymore, because the aliens did that for us. What we couldn’t, or what we refused, to do for ourselves. They brought us ourselves back, as a collective idea, “humanity.” Not our will not to survive, as individuals, but to survive only if we could survive in groups, together.

We long for the zombie apocalypse--let’s face it--because we are in the midst of a quiet human apocalypse. We are the zombies, blunted, shambling: not good enough, most of us, at anything in particular. Not so good, “that good,” crazy good, to be undoubtedly, consistently chosen by the single-winner crane game that our imposingly unequal economy has become. Most of us are fourth-rate archers, and we fear--we feel--that the world claims to have no desire for us. That Atlas shrugs, has been shrugging for a while now, and still the apocalypse refuses to come.