Zombies Among Us

I've never been a fan of zombie flicks...neither the movie Night of the Living Dead from 1968 nor the recent Walking Dead television series and its spinoffs.  The genre, which features reanimated, soulless corpses that infect others they encounter until hordes threaten humanity's very existence, never captured my imagination...until just recently, that is, when it occurred to me that in a figurative sense there are zombies among us in this real world.  These are people, "dead from the neck up" as the saying goes, who have voluntarily surrendered their own souls to unquestioningly idolize one mortal, flawed figure...namely Donald Trump...and to believe everything he says and follow his commands without reservation.  You cannot reason with these people any more than the human heroes of those zombie shows could with their counterparts...they are self-brainwashed personality cult followers on the same order as that freakish Heaven's Gate group in the nineties that committed collective suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet and the leftist People's Temple under the murderous Jim Jones in the seventies who forced his own people to commit mass "suicide" in Guyana.  In 2021 those in this version of the phenomenon are sustained and energized by the Internet and TV networks that deliberately seek to inflame their passions on behalf of their "lord master". Since Trump is a national political leader, the comparisons to fascist strongmen with cult followers such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler also come to mind.  The upshot is that even when our problematic president is finally out of office, he's still going to be out there and those tens of millions of Americans are going to still be slavishly following him as their idol, lord and source of "truth"...to this I add a major disclaimer that I don't believe that all who voted for Trump are like this...but sadly a large portion are, and keep in mind that on the day after the January 6th insurrection, a public opinion poll revealed that 45% of Republicans supported it.  When Trump finally does disappear from the scene (he is getting along in years, after all), the zombies will find another idol to latch themselves onto...someone who undoubtedly will use our very soon-to-be former president's demeanor and behavior as a template to build their own personality cult.  And these folks are everywhere, like the Matrix: in your workplace, when you're shopping, at your churches, on the roads, among the police and military, among your political representatives, and in your neighborhoods and schools.  Zombies.  Among us.