Enough with the 'Zombie Apocalypse' Already

You know the "Miami Zombie," right? He's the drug-addled man who was killed by police after he was found eating another man's face on some sort of bridge. It's a wild story, to be sure. But when we start making this insanely awful thing into an internet meme, then we've gone too far.

Just a quick note to all you inter-nauts out there, re: this whole zombie apocalypse thing: Stop it. You know the "Miami Zombie," right? He's the drug-addled man who was killed by police after he was found eating another man's face on some sort of bridge. It's a wild story, to be sure. And we are free to pass it to our friends and say "Hey, crazy story." But when we start making this insanely awful thing into an internet trend, a meme as the kids say, then we've gone too far.

We're referring specifically to things like this patently grotesque slideshow that the Daily Beast has put together, one that links a random series of hideous events — a man flinging his own intestines at policemen, a young woman stricken with a horrifying flesh-eating bacteria — to create some ricky-ticky narrative of a zombie apocalypse quietly fomenting. Of course no one is serious about a coming zombie plague, which is what makes posts like this all the more tasteless. It's an ironic joke (a boring and overused ironic joke at that -- zombies are so very 2009) made at the faraway expense of genuine suffering. Like, a man, a troubled homeless man no less, did have his face eaten off, guys. That did happen! It's a real, sad, terrible thing that happened. All those other catastrophes are real too. Stringing together a bunch of awful tragedies for the purpose of making a lazy listicle is so checked-out and blase and insensitive that it's, well, kinda disgusting.

And maybe avoid doing the zombie map, and stop prattling on about this on Twitter. It's opportunistic and unseemly and kinda sad. Look, we are guilty of the same kind of macabre capitalizing, so we are claiming no exemption here, but something about the degree of giddiness about this "zombie apocalypse" fiction sticks out as especially ugly. Just maybe try not to be so excited that some poor man had his face chewed off by a naked drug addict who still had bits of flesh in his mouth when he was shot and killed. Maybe that doesn't exactly merit a slideshow.

We know it's easy to be sanctimonious about stuff like this, to shake a fist at whatever hot topic thing is currently flooding our Twitter feeds. But sometimes sanctimony is necessary. So please, people of the internet, stop it with the Miami Zombie. No more lists, no more galleries, no more tenuous connections made to other unimaginably terrible events. It was fun for about a second before it got gross.

Now if you'll excuse us, we gotta go make some Dexter jokes about this horrible nightmare.