Carnival showman and world class huckster P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Robert Ripley asked readers every week in his comic strip to “Believe It Or Not.” A comment from a good friend will often begin with “You’re not going to believe this, but…”
Even in the face of impossibility, people will believe pretty much anything.
Take for instance the idea of a zombie apocalypse like the one at the center of AMC Television’s The Walking Dead. People know deep in the recesses of their brains that there’s no possible way the dead can come back to life and prey on the living. And yet, it seems every other conversation is about just that; what to do when the zombies come.
People are buying guns and stockpiling food, water and ammunition at a record pace. The news reported last year about the drug “bath salts” and the drug-induced homicides surrounding them as zombie attacks. Just last month a Montana television station was hacked and the pranksters ran a fake Emergency Broadcast Alert announcing that “the bodies of the recently dead have risen,” a la Night of the Living Dead.
Perhaps the fervor surrounding the nation’s infatuation with zombies comes from a different source. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia released an article entitled “Preparedness 101: Zombie Outbreak” in May of 2011. At first thought, this seems a colossal waste of time and resources. With limited funds and multiple other situations requiring their attention, why would the CDC put out something better found in the back issues of Fangoria magazine?
But the idea makes sense of some levels. When giving a child its medicine, the more palatable it is, the easier it goes down. The CDC is simply giving people a dose of disaster prevention and making them want it by putting it in a zombie invasion wrapper.
The article states that “there are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”
Also consider the arrival and eventual passing of December 21, 2012, the so-called end of the world as predicted by the ancient Mayan civilization. There sat the huddled masses, awaiting the destruction of the earth, only to see the day come and go with scarcely a rainstorm much less total devastation. The idea of full-blown annihilation was, in a word, unbelievable.
And yet, people believed it.
Twelve years earlier, the ”Y2K” bug had America crippled with fear, thinking that because of a possible error in computer software that would improperly format the date and not recognize the millennium change, society would crumble and return to living in caves, hunting with spears and painting on the walls.
Countless religions and cults indoctrinate followers with hooey to which no sane person could ever fall victim, but the gullible masses get brainwashed in record numbers daily.
Gun rights activists swear the government is out to take guns away from American citizens, that it’s happening right now all around them, but no one has ever even mentioned a possible plan to do so.
An old French proverb states “To believe a thing impossible is to make it so.” This may be true, but the inverse is not. Believing something possible, like zombies, planetary destruction, sea creatures and aliens will never make them come to pass. Putting faith in impossibilities and ignoring reality only makes Barnum right, as he celebrates the birth of yet another sucker.