THE ETHICS OF 'WALKING DEAD'.

Actor Lennie James as Morgan Jones in Walking Dead.



Zombie fiction is not my favorite genre. After all, I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic and a former hospice nurse. I have seen enough people die. I have seen enough living people who looked dead.

AMC's Walking Dead, however, has captured my interest. I catch up with it on Netflix. I have no tolerance for TV's first-broadcast commercial interruptions. I have watched 6 seasons of the series.

For those of you not familiar with the show, it is founded on a post-viral-apocalyptic-zombie premise. It's been done before. But this serial drama is more than oozing special effects. The nature of a series, as Charles Dickens discovered to his advantage, engages followers through characters who develop or die off. The Walking Dead ensemble are generally very engaging, except for the zombies.

Last night I watched an episode in which a traumatized character recovers from severe PTSD which had turned him into a raging serial murderer of live humans, as well as a zombie sweeper of admirable proportions. The parallel to military combatants is obvious. That wasn't the focus of my interest.

The newly awakened murderer, trained by a survivalist psychiatrist who adopts him, lives with the question of whether or not taking any life is ethical. This is a perilous conundrum in a world of drooling cannibal zombies and feral humans who travel around in raiding tribes. The character in the ethical dilemma has been trained by his mentor in Aikido, a modern Japanese martial art which is based in a compassionate form of self defense which abhors killing. He travels through his dangerous world with a long stick with blunted ends after the psychiatrist breaks his lethally pointed spear.

My experience of working as an RN with violent mental patients in locked psychiatric wards allows me to identify strongly with the character, who is surrounded by other relatively gentle survivors who don't hesitate to shoot anyone or thing who comes after their innards or their supply of canned beans and bottled water. They think the Aikido man with qualms is simply cracked. Yet they are in awe of his ability to defend himself and others. So, he becomes a valued member of the troop.

Today's urban environment is ostensibly less messy than Walking Dead's zombie world. I suppose starving zombies and overweight people who would run you down with their SUV to get to the next Dunkin Donuts do share some qualities. As an senior citizen, I am feeling that a once-presumed level of safety and peace are severely threatened in my own urban environment. Recently I have been harassed by a young homophobic neighbor, for example.

Granted, my neighbor doesn't want to ingest my brain, but the effect of constant harassment on the border between our properties does raise some of the questions I see my Aikido avatar facing. Do I descend to the level of my neighbor's obnoxious behavior in retaliation? Or do I somehow compassionately turn his aggression away? My choice is a practiced form of the latter. I ignore the insult, stay on my side of the border and appealed to structured authority, something lacking in zombie worlds.

There comes the next ethical question: What do I do when structured authority also wants to ignore the insult and refuses to intervene? I believe this question is increasingly relevant in the urban context. So, I am following my Aikido friend in Walking Dead with some interest. Maybe he will find a path through his conundrum. Maybe not. In any case, I am enjoying his process of finding out better than I am enjoying my own. And I find that in itself troubling.