Friday, March 22, 2013

Face of the Enemy


Hey, this post is by Beckley…ladies.  I feel weird posting about the UAS and life in general after yesterday’s post where Josh laid out all this personal information and shared about his mom.  I feel like I’m chucking rocks into a quiet pond.  Still, Josh did say he wasn’t going to post today due to being busy, so let’s talk about the UAS’ recent actions.

I had a whole response and message to the UAS written out when Josh discovered that South Americans were immigrating into UAS territory.  I really let the UAS have it.  I, like a lot of people, assumed that the UAS was using the Latinos as cannon fodder and the racism made me nauseous.  I had this burning righteous anger and I wrote all about it.

But now we’ve discovered that the UAS aren’t as morally bankrupt as I assumed.  I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise since I lived there for, like, a minute.  In the days that followed my unposted rant, I’ve become disturbed by how readily I jumped to conclusions.  Josh has talked about how the UAS is made up of human beings just like us.  These are people that are scared, who just want to live their lives.  They have nothing to do with the UAS leadership or the violence of this war.  Hell, from what Josh has found, a lot of the UAS soldiers don’t want anything to do with the wanton violence we’ve seen.  Yet when I found out that the UAS was allowing people to immigrate, I immediately assumed slave labor.  It was a knee jerk reaction.  And the implication is that this UAS hatred and bigotry has rubbed off on me.

And it is bigotry.  Let’s call it like it is.  People hate the UAS around here.  Yes, there are cooler heads who don’t want war, who just want to live in peace.  But ask those same people what they think of the UAS and you’ll be hard pressed to find many who are alright with their existence.  See, not wanting war and being alright with the UAS being alive in the next territory over are two different things.  Hell, I’ve even heard people describe me as “one of the good ones” when talking about the UAS.  Somehow I’ve become the exception to the evil that is every other human being in the UAS.  It’s the same bigotry and prejudice that gave us such wonderful pre-fall comments like, “Now I’m not racist and I’ve got lots of black/white/Latino/Asian/Indian/Lithuanian friends, buuuuuuuut…did you ever notice how those people blah blah blah, I’m a racist piece of crap.”  Just replace your ethnicity du jour with the UAS and you’ve got the fashionable prejudice of this post-fall world.  And I fell right into it.

I keep trying to convince myself that it wasn’t bigotry.  Maybe I assumed slave labor because in the pre-fall world there was a lot of prejudice aimed at Latino immigrants, legal or otherwise.  Maybe I was already primed to assume that people would try to use Latino immigrants to do the work they didn’t want to soil their lily white hands with, just like before the dead started walking and eating.  That justification made me feel better for a second or two, but I was just fooling myself.  It’s prejudice against the UAS plain and simple.  I was wrong.  And a lot of you are wrong too.  You armchair diplomats saying in absolute terms that there can be no peace.  Those of you cackling about attacking UAS territory.  Those of you scoffing at how the UAS stayed safe in their bunker when you would have been begging for a seat right next to them if you’d had the chance.  Those of you who say that I’m one of the good ones while still giving me the stink eye and hoping that you’re the one to execute me when I inevitably show my devious UAS nature and betray you all.  Most of us are horribly prejudiced.  Well, the cure for prejudice is knowledge, so I’m going to introduce you to someone I knew during my time in the UAS.  It will put more of a human face on the UAS for all of you as well as refreshing my memory.

There was this guy named Trevor.  Now you’re going to hate this guy.  Not because he’s a full-grown man with the name of a first-grader (I’m a snob, I know), but rather because he was the go-between for the UAS government and the UAS town leaders.  Trevor studied political theory and whatnot at University of Michigan.  And of course, that’s another reason not to like him because only sad, pathetic people cheer for the Wolverines.  I think I speak for all civilized human beings when I say, “Ohio State Buckeyes, son!”  Regardless, Trevor went into politics and eventually became a senior aide for some senator.  When the fall came, into the bunker the senator went.  And that senator pulled some strings to get Trevor in there too.

Trevor (and others) would bring news, orders, policies, whatever, to the town leaders throughout the UAS territory.  He was the voice of the government, and he made sure that same government played a role in all of our lives.  If this war ended tomorrow with the capture of UAS leadership, you can bet that Trevor will be there in the firing squad with all the other UAS leaders.  You hate that little collaborator, don’t you?

But here’s the thing.  Trevor was a really great guy.  In the world that was, he tutored at-risk kids.  He plays the violin and when in town would regularly do concerts on a Stradivarius he looted after he left the bunker.  His family, all of whom are dead now, raised foster kids and he wanted to do the same, and in fact has done so with the myriad orphans this apocalypse has caused.  Trevor would sneak luxury foods out of the main UAS compound and give them out to the kids in town.  Jelly beans, chocolate, that kind of thing.  One time, I swear to you, he somehow got his hands on homemade ice cream and drove through town in an ice cream truck he’d found.  You should have seen the kids’ faces.

Oh, yeah, and there are kids in the UAS too.  We keep forgetting that, don’t we?

So what is it we really want when we give in to our prejudices?  You can say Trevor is a collaborator and you’re right.  He’s horribly misguided, he spreads propaganda, and in a real way he’s dangerous.  But if you kill him, you remove something fundamentally good from this world.  Do we really want to crush the UAS?  Because that will kill a lot of kids and a lot of innocent families who are just as scared of this war as you.  And let’s face it, a majority of you out there who hate the UAS and want them dead aren’t out their fighting.  You’re sitting safe and warm in your homes with electricity (so stoked about that, by the way).  It’s easy to hate the enemy from afar or when you’re on the other end of a gun.  But at the end of the day your hatred is lazy and offensive and disgusting.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight the UAS.  If they give us no choice, we have to defend ourselves.  But we should never ever relish that fact.  We should not strut about our victories over other human beings.  We should not welcome death.  The world may be filled with walking corpses that look human, but that does not mean that humanity has become disposable.  There’s been so much death already.  How dare you ask for more just to satisfy your own bigotry?

8 comments:

  1. I'm not understanding the tyraid this morning. Is Haven looking for a fight or are they preparing to defend the Union's way of life? I thought it was the latter. Is something going on behind the scenes that most of us are unaware of? What's been going on in the week-long-plus war in the west (Ketill's group)? We all agree there has been enough wastful death, by zombies AND by other survivors. I thought we were reaching out to offer an alternative to the violence by allowing UAS members to defect. Are there plans to attack UAS? What's the point?

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  2. The point is that the situation is complex. The point is that we cannot afford as a people to treat the enemy as an absolute evil, which I think Beckley has explained pretty well here. As far as the war in the west, Ketill is chronicling that as best he can on his own blog, but communications are spotty at best. I haven't had detailed reports from there, both because their connection to the outside is fairly unreliable and because I fear that my discussing details of an active combat zone I'm far removed from might be a bad idea.

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  3. Exactly, it's all about complexity. I don't know what all is happening on the front because I'm not generally included in the war planning. I'm just speaking to the complexity and as a response to the "Bring it on" cavalier attitude that I see people having. We all know that New Haven is about defending its people, but the people need to also recognize what it means to fight this war. It may end up being necessary, but it's still a loss and we have to recognize it. Prejudice stops us from that realization and its on us to change.

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  4. the front is now at a bit of a stalemate, in my area it has become trench warfare. We are getting a steady trickle of UAS soldiers who want to just live, some have read what their leaders have done and are disillusioned with them, we have even had a couple of our men decide to stop fighting. This battle is still in the balance but I think the loss of life has now tailed off. Ketill will be posting a full report soon I am lead to believe. thank you for your support during this time. To me the rank and file are not demonised but the leaders are despised for their tactics and rhetoric. I would gladly lower my arms if they would do the same and leave us to live as we want

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  5. I think that someone needs to remind the Bureaucracy of the UAS that they are waging a war against their fellow Americans. Fellow Americans who have the right to bear arms and defend their homes, their lives and their liberty against all who would threaten to take them; including anyone not directly elected to positions of authority.
    We are the well regulated militia. You were not elected by the people, and you are clearly only out for yourselves, not for the people.
    Do the honorable thing and stand aside, lay down your self-appointed authority and allow cooler heads to prevail and end this needless bloodshed.

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