“World War
Z” was released on June 21st. I didn’t see it until July 22nd.
I hadn’t planned to see it at all, but based on a few things I read and heard,
I decided to give it a try. And it was far, far better than I expected it to
be.
United
Nations employee Gerry Lane traverses the world in a race against time to stop
the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments, and threatening to
destroy humanity itself.
Here are a
few thoughts I had as I watched the movie and reflected on it later.
When your
world is ending, that which truly matters is thrown into sharp relief. This is
true of our individual worlds coming to an end, or seeming to, no less than apocalyptic
events. And since the former happens every single day and the latter seldom, I
take the latter to be a metaphor for the former.
What really
matters? What is superfluous? Silly? Wasteful of the little bit of life we’re
given to live? Don’t wait for zombies or a diagnosis. We’re all terminal. Dying
at this very moment. Now is the time to live, to love. Take good care of those
in your care. Embrace life and those you love every moment. Your life is now.
We live in
a world of walking dead. Where once were humans.
The world
is a wasteland where too much whiskey and too many pills and too much food and
too many things and too much consuming and too much mindlessness and too much
busyness and too much distraction and too much certainty and too much
conformity and too much idealism and patriotism and blind ambition and greed
and a certain type of spiritless, soulless, rigid religion has numbed us to
death.
Every
moment we choose. We either join the ranks of the walking dead or dwell among
the living. We shake ourselves and wake up or we continue to slumber. We are
mindful or mindless in the moment—fully engaged, fully aware, fully alive or we're
distracted, worried, dull, dead, letting the past and the future rob us of all
this moment has to offer.
Hordes of
lifeless things threaten to rob us of our humanity. Every single day. Our souls
are at stake. Hold onto your humanity. Don’t sell it. Don’t give it. Don’t let
it be taken forcibly from you. We are surrounded by those who’ve rubbed out
their humanity, who only have a rough and calloused place where once a human
person resided.
How do we
win World War Z? How do we beat back incivility and inhumanity and the very
death of the soul? With humanity itself. With weakness and vulnerability. With
nothing less than mortality. We fight. We fight not the monsters without so
much as the abyss within, the dead thing we can become if we are not vigilant,
if we don't practice faith, hope, and love—but mostly love. The practice of
compassion, even for dead things, even for the lifelessness within ourselves, is
the key to end all apocalypse—both of the individual and the global varieties.
