In an effort to watch something slightly less chaotic than The Ultimatum, I’ve been watching The Walking Dead. I don’t watch while I eat. I skim the blurbs for the season ahead of time so I can be prepared for who dies and when the arc of chaos will ease up. But I’m slowly making my way through the series after putting it down a couple years ago. And I’m rounding the corner on S6E11 “The Distance.”
*spoilers*
The episode is painful. The gang of survivors is being offered the chance to enter another camp. They are being offered safety and sanctuary and food and water, all things they’ve been without for so long. All things they need if they want to stay more than alive. If they want to stay human.
But they’ve been offered safety before. They had it at a farm and zombies overwhelmed them, in part, because a dispute between members led to someone firing a gun and attracting a horde. Then they had it at a prison and a pissed off survivor who’d been kicked out of the community left a door open. Zombie horde. Some of them had it at a fortified town…run by a psychopathic megalomanic who (checks notes) tortured and killed several of them to keep his power. This same megalomanic attacked the remaining survivors at the prison by firing tanks (because THAT is smart in the middle of a zombie apocalypse when you really don’t want to attract undead attention). Boom. Zombie horde. The gang managed to regroup by following signs to another supposed safe camp which turned out to be run by cannibals. To get out they had to (checks notes) cause an explosion that led to (checks notes) a zombie horde. Another couple of them were injured and taken in by a group of former Atlanta PD who also happened to be rapist megalomaniacs (I was shocked, I say, shocked). This time there was no zombie horde, but someone was still killed when they tried to get their people out.
Which is to say, the only thing more dangerous than zombies in this post-apocalyptic verse is—human beings. And not just one. Our motley crew is made up of onesies—folks essentially picked up here and there over the course of the seasons, in sets of ones, twos and threes. They managed to come together into a force, but they didn’t start off that way. Human beings, societies, former institutions whether “governors” or police officers….these are as dangerous to our crew as the zombies themselves.
And they know it.
So when faced with another chance to find refuge, they are justifiably skeptical. In fact, they are nearly murderous and the emissary from the safe camp almost doesn’t make it out of his diplomacy alive.
I’ve been thinking about this episode, how slow and deliberate it is. And thinking about trauma responses and organizing at the end of the world and decolonization (as more than a metaphor). And what Octavia Butler said about human beings being our own worst poison. Our hierarchies. Our territorialism. Our inability to commune with each other and the planet. I’ve long wondered if this is what prevented her from writing the third parables book (because, really, can it get any worse than Parable of the Talents?).
But I’ve also been thinking about what it means to try to organize and create community and have hope in the face of repeated displacements and terrors of our own making. When you can’t blame the violence on a undead force—when the unmaking of yourself and your home and your kinfolk is other human beings despite the fucking apocalypse happening to EVERYONE—I mean, what are you supposed to feel? How do you ever trust that a safe space can exist? How do you ever hope again?
They do end up hoping enough to go to the safe house, although they aren’t stupid. They check out the story, they listen, do their research. And it isn’t entirely hope that puts them back into a new camp—it is need. They need to feel human and safe again, even if they accept that it is temporary. Michonne says it herself: “You can be out here too long.”
When do you know it is time to stop fighting, even if it is temporary? When do you distrust your own very legitimate and proven trauma response and past experiences because you have to or you might never be sane again? How do you stop—what do you corroborate, what evidence do you need, how do you check the facts of the story? And what does conflict and engagement look like in a safe space where you are building together versus “out there” where a gun or a machete are the only things that might keep you alive another night? How do you fight different—do you fight different—when you are fighting your own people and you have a shared goal for what the work is. Do you have a shared vision?
When do you rest? When do you hope again?
I don’t know. But this is bugging me, so here’s a shorty post on deliverance and why we so often miss the chance to be delivered from and for ourselves.
~*~