The Idiot Apocalypse

Prologue 1. We were ready to go, but we didn’t want to go near the door yet. The child had picked up a boxed toy off the pile near the doors and was screaming his head off. Mama, oblivious to the fact she was standing in the store’s main doorway, was trying to soothe the child, and he wasn’t having any of that. He wanted his TOY! And Mama finally put him down, took the box and headed for the register to buy it for him.

The child, finding himself uncomforted, unheld, and unattended, howled for a moment. And then he realized that Mama had left him with the rest of the boxed toys. He quit howling. And he picked up another one and proceeded to tear it open...

Prologue 2. “How the hell did he even get out of his CAR?” I asked.

We stood there and looked at our car. There was no way Berni was getting into the driver’s seat. The guy in the next space had backed into his spot, and his wheels were right on the line. His driver’s side door was within inches of OUR driver’s side door.

“I can’t see how he got OUT,” I repeated. “What, was he two dimensional? Or did he just park like an idiot and then climbed out of the passenger side? What the hell?”

And with some stoicism, Berni went to the passenger side of OUR car and proceeded to climb across to the driver’s seat.

Prologue 3. Ever see a zombie movie?

There’s a hell of a lot of them. And in most of the best ones, you get some foreshadowing, some clue that something is amiss. The zombies aren’t overrunning the landscape YET... but in an alley, you see this one guy staggering around aimlessly. Or in a graveyard scene, you see an abandoned funeral, left amid overturned chairs and an empty coffin... a clue that SOMETHING is terribly WRONG...

The first one, Night Of The Living Dead, had this. THERE was a movie that shot the sheriff in the first paragraph, yessirree. None of this character development, none of this Getting To Know Doomed Characters, naw, we go straight from Johnny being a jerk to his sister Barbara while this weird man staggers in the background, to suddenly he’s ON them, and he’s a ZOMBIE, and oh, SHIIIIIT--

Main story. ...and so, I ducked out this morning to run a couple errands. I’d forgotten about the idiot mom and her spoiled child the previous night, as well as the fellow who’d been so careful to park backwards in his spot that he apparently didn’t care if he or anyone else could actually get in or out of their cars...

And while I was out, I encountered an old friend: the person who roars past you well above the speed limit... gets in front of you... and slams on the brakes. Because they wanted to go ten miles UNDER the speed limit, they just wanted to do it in front of YOU.

This was actually a good thing. Because since I slowed down, I was nowhere near the guy who decided to change lanes without looking, and clipped the box truck in the lane into which he was veering. The box truck wobbled, and traffic all around him scattered, and I tapped the brakes and decided perhaps the side streets would be better, and took the next exit.

Errands weren’t much better. At one place, I was unable to approach the product I wished to buy because of a little mob of employees dragging around a pallet jack in such a way as to cleverly block the aisles as they carried on their conversation.

As I shopped for groceries, I encountered a man with no cart who apparently needed to block as much of the aisle as he could with his own body, to demonstrate his bigness. I grew frustrated.

....and out of nowhere... I found myself imagining a scene in every zombie movie. The scene where it hasn’t COMPLETELY hit the fan... but all the signs are there...

And it hit me: what if the zombie virus doesn’t turn you into a zombie? What if it just makes you oblivious and stupid?

It was a staggering thought. As the very large spread out man lurched towards me, I said, “ExCUSE me!”

He noticed me for the first time. He brought his arms and legs back into his personal space. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” And he walked past me like a normal human. He hadn’t MEANT to be trying to take up the entire aisle. He’d just been... oblivious. Just like the employees with the pallet jack who had turned hardware shopping into a slow motion adventure. Just like the idjit who’d been so concerned with parking, it never occurred to him that he was blocking others.

Oblivious.

And I envisioned that somehow, the Idjit Plague had been released the previous night, and Berni and I had simply been seeing the first cases, the Patient Zeroes, so to speak... and now the pandemic was underway. The March of the Morons. The birth of a generation of perfect voters. Idiocracy. The death of good customer service and awareness of others around you.

And it hit me again: Just like the employees with the pallet jack who had turned hardware shopping into a slow motion adventure. Just like the idjit who’d been so concerned with parking, it never occurred to him that he was blocking others.

Oblivious.

And I envisioned that somehow, the Idjit Plague had been released the previous night, and Berni and I had simply been seeing the first cases, the Patient Zeroes, so to speak... and now the pandemic was underway. The March of the Morons. The birth of a generation of perfect voters. Idiocracy. The death of good customer service and awareness of others around you.

And it hit me again: if I was right... how would we know?