- Time
- Post link
That is actually extremely clever. I did the same thing with my old room mate to make him feel cooler about having all my survival stuff in the hall closet (though it was kind of sad that calling my stash "zombie apocalypse survival supplies" instead of "nuclear disaster or other major emergency survival supplies" got him to stop smirking, rolling his eyes, and calling me needlessly paranoid and actually excited enough to go along with it).
Obviously what the CDC is doing here is using the popular sensation of zombies to promote preparedness in the event of any kind of an emergency. And it is a brilliant idea. People tend to be scared so much by this sort of stuff, that they don't want to even think about it. The idea that disaster could strike and things could fall apart for a while is so frightening, from my experience a lot of people would rather just laugh and say that you're being ridiculous for even suggesting the possibility than to consider taking a minimal step to prepare. People don't like to think that someday when you click that light switch, lights won't come on. Or when you turn the tap, clean potable water won't pour out.
As I discovered first hand from my former room mate, posing it as preparedness for a potential zombie apocalypse makes it less real. Puts it in an exciting fantasy setting. While my suggestion of zombies should have been the point he began rolling his eyes at me and sniggering, instead it made him think it was a really fun idea to have all these gallons of extra water and other crap taking up ridiculous amounts of space in the closet and to tell people it was our zombocalypse survival gear. He isn't a stupid person and he obviously didn't really think we were preparing for an event that would cause the dead to come back and eat us, I just think staging our survival stash as in the event of zombies made it way less frightening to him than the real (and very probable) scenarios that I was listing, and easier for him to cope with and get into.
Maybe this CDC blog post will get just a few zombie fans to invest some storage space to a decent supply of water and other important things to have stashed in the event of an emergency. If so, then it served its purpose well.
