Today a friend told me that her daughter, who goes to college not that far from San Bernardino, phoned her after the horrific terrorist attack there, to say she was extremely upset and frightened. Which is not surprising.
But something about that got me thinking about the event in question. In some ways it was like the also horrific terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere. But it also felt like an act apart, different in some essential way.
Eventually I worked out why it felt different: This was a terrorist attack by people upon their own neighbors. The couple that perpetrated this act lived right next door to people who had no idea there was any danger. This act of madness and terror was not inflicted by terrorists outside the community, but by terrorists inside the community, who had been infected with a destructive apocalyptic ideology, as though by a virus.
One thing that I find frightening about all this is how much it feels like a zombie movie come to life. Your friends and neighbors become infected by the virus, which turns them into creatures that kill. In the process they seem to lose the essential sense of shared humanity that causes us to cherish human life, and to recognize what a terrible tragedy it is when that life is taken away.
I’ve always thought of “zombie apocalypse” as merely a way to describe a genre of fiction. I never thought, until now, that it would become an apt description of a real-world ideology.