Global Warming Zombies

Sometime when we all weren’t paying attention, a lot of the folks in this country became zombies. It’s frightening, but true. We are surrounded by people whose minds have been stolen, their powers of observation and judgment replaced. But it isn’t voodoo, folks - what we have here is 1984, just a few years late.

Uh oh - I may have to explain about that 1984 reference for those who are maybe younger than me or who maybe haven’t quite the same reading experience as I’ve had. 1984 is the title of a book written by George Orwell that takes place the year 1984, and is about a civil servant whose work consists of falsifying records and political literature. His job is one small part of the government mechanism for maintaining control of the population. 1984 is where the term “Big Brother” came from.

1984’s mind control comes about through propaganda (spin doctoring in today’s terminology - the twisting of language so that words do not describe truth but sound like the truth), regulation of society through legislation of behavior to undermine the rights of the individual. Invasive surveillance is used to insure compliance.

With just a few substitutions, that could be a description of what’s going on in the United States today.

But back to zombies. A zombie is a creature displaying all the apparent signs of consciousness, but without actual consciousness of its own. Traditionally, zombies are corpses brought back to life, but the term is also used to describe a person whose thought processes are controlled by someone else - traditionally, that would be your evil voodoo guy, or, like in 1984, Big Brother.

How do I know that so many friends and neighbors, from the grocery store clerk to our legislators and everyone in between have become zombies? It’s simple. How many of you believe in global warming - raise your hands. OK, everyone - look around. See all those raised hands? Those will be your zombies. Those will be the people that spew out the Big Brother environmental drivel in spite of what they see and feel for themselves, like how darned cold it was last month. These are people who ignore data like last month’s reports across the world of unseasonable snow and plummeting temperatures and record snowfalls. Here in the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

Global warming? Have these people stepped outside lately? Would they consider keeping their own records and paying more attention to them than to talking heads on TV? The highest temperature recorded in Phoenix - 122° - was recorded 18 years ago, not last year. In fact, the hottest recorded temperature on earth was way back in 1922 (136° in Mali). In January 2008, the Boston Globe reported that the winter 2007 was one the coldest ever recorded in South America, with snow in Buenos Aires for the first time in 89 years and hundreds of people dying of cold in Peru. Snow in South Africa! Record breaking cold in Australia! And the Globe even said “For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming”.

Enquiring minds want to know: How do you cure a zombie? How do you get people to think with their own minds, not parrot sound bytes? If Big Brother takes over the country and the planet, what will the people do who invested in shorts and tank tops when they really need mukluks and parkas? And if the zombies all freeze to death, what will Big Brother’s next step be to control the rest of us?