Friday wrote:Romero's most important work, Night of the Living Dead, showed that this trope is true even when there are literal monsters at the door.
I believe, honestly, that people want this trope to be discredited not because it's lazy, but because they just want to hang on to that inner belief that "people are good at heart. Deep down, they're good."
Nah bro. They ain't, and if 2020 was your fucking wake up call, then you were hopelessly naive and ignorant of all history. Which you were, because we teach that people are good, and we teach that history was clean. So it wasn't entirely your fault, but read a fucking book please.
OTOH, 2020 is an illustration that Romero was wrong, that the entire zombie apocalypse genre he created is wrong, that for the most part people don't turn into desperate, uncontrollable id monsters when a plague threatens their civilization. Indeed, for the most part the people doing real harm aren't the people saying "Fuck it, absent the laws of society I'm going to murder and rape and hurt other people with impunity"; they're the people desperately trying to preserve the status quo and act like everything is normal and go about their daily routines, and become angry when that's threatened.
Most people aren't like that, though. Most people are doing the best they can with the hand they've been dealt. They're trying to do what's best not just for themselves and their family, but for their community and everybody else around them.
(I ain't being my old 20-something edgelord self. I don't believe that people are bad anymore either. They're just people. You guys are a good example of a group of people that I do believe to be good at heart, and I have quite a few irl friends who I think that about too.)
Maybe. I'd say the human behavior we've seen these past months do indicate that, on balance, there are more people who are good than people who are bad. But the bad ones sure have an outsized effect.