Fear and Loathing in Miami: Looking Back at the Miami Zombie Incident
I was sitting in front of my computer, probably browsing Facebook, when I first heard about the Miami Zombie incident. For those of you who don’t remember let’s have a little refresher course. Rudy Eugene, high on “Bath Salts,” stripped naked, ate the face off a homeless man and was shot by police. After reading a few articles I saw #Zombies was trending on Google+. I checked the posts and saw people linking together unrelated cases of cannibalism and called it a zombie outbreak. The only similarity in these cases was that they were acts of cannibalism.
When people fear something they search for anything that could be related to that fear and automatically associate what they find with it, no matter how unrelated they are. In this case, the other cannibals were completely civilized. Eugene was growling like a dog and reverting to his animal instincts. Another post I noticed was written by a man after the CDC announced that Eugene wasn’t a zombie, claiming the entire thing to be a government cover-up. I explained that the CDC had to announce such a thing because if they didn’t there’d be an army of rednecks arming themselves with shotguns, shooting their neighbors, raping women, and pillaging Wal-Mart. The argument got me nowhere and I left the man to his insane conspiracies.
Almost two months have passed and Ronald Poppo, the homeless man who was attacked, is alive. Though he is far from fine and his face will probably never be the same, I am thankful that he survived. Sometimes I wonder if he’s happy he survived. In the condition his face is in, maybe he’d be happier if he hadn’t lived. The government is clamouring for the illegalization of “Bath Salts” and others are saying the government has no right to tell us what we can and can’t put in our body because it’s our right to choose. I believe that your rights end when they have the possibility of infringing on the rights of another.
The people of Miami seem to have gotten over the event and there is even talk of putting the spot where the attack took place on a tour. Anything for a little tourist money in this disgusting society we live in. Maybe the loon on Google+ was right. Maybe this was a conspiracy. But not to cover up a zombie outbreak, only to milk tourist dollars at the expense of a man’s life and another’s dignity.
In retrospect, if the “Miami Zombie Incident’ has taught us anything it’s the following. People will do anything for a buck, fear will always triumph over facts, people will believe almost anything bad about the government, and junkies will say anything to get their fix. Go Gonzo Journal may not be the most popular news source, or the most reliable (but truth is subjective in most cases), but we are a news source for the people and we will never stop being that. I think I speak for all of us here when I say thank you for reading, because it’s a Gonzo world out there and we’re needed to make sense of it.
