This hijack about the color of the racists is strange. If the group doesn’t believe in racial mixing, they’re obviously going to be the same color as the poster they’re inviting to stay.
If the other group had helped me survive an apocalypse for months, they’d probably feel like family. I couldn’t abandon them and leave them in the more vulnerable position of having even less people to look out for them.
For the benefit of those of us who don’t watch Walking Dead, exactly what sort of revenants are those, in case it informs my decision?
Also, you appeared to make an “interracial” exception in post #9, but what about biracial?
That’s quite the dilemma. I could probably put up with racists, in the event of a life or death situation, as well as religious zealots, forceful vegans, the extremely greedy or even Tea Partiers. The prospect of being stuck with them is slightly better than being devoured alive by zombies.
They’re reasonably complex racists, since they’re saving and caring for the undesirable.
I’m part of the problem the group, being a mixed marriage participant myself. I suppose I would disclose it? It’s a hard question, really, what with the kids and all. They might “pass” for awhile, but who knows what the future holds. Their features might change, their skin tone might change, they might talk about obviously foreign relations. I think not disclosing might make life gut-wrenchingly stressful. After surviving the zombies and reaching a safe haven, very tempting to try and stay though.
I think we’d stay. I’d try my best for my companions, but you had me at “family” and “apocalypse”.
It totally depends on my relationship to my existing group. If it’s a small band of loosely-grouped survivors that I just happened to meet along the way, not anyone I’m super-close to (emotionally), I’d ditch them in a heartbeat to improve my and my fiance’s chances of survival.
On the other hand, if we were really tight-knit and emotionally-bonded, we’d stay outside the bunker.
If you go all psychomurderer because these guys don’t help random strangers enough, you are the villain.
Whether or not I stayed with them, I would keep on good terms with them. They are actively helpful even to people they don’t like - that they are even nicer to some people doesn’t make them bad neighbours.
How does one join the zombies, in this apocalypse?
You die.
I’d stay. I’d rather live than not. I wouldn’t give a fuck about racism because it will never change anyway. It’s always existed, it continues to exist, it always will exist.* It’s easy to pontificate about how you couldn’t possibly stand to even breathe within 10,000 miles of a racist, but I’m pretty sure it’d be a different situation when it’s life or death.
*At some points in history it’s just better covered up than in others. But it’s never going away.
This is a big piece of it to me; the other big piece is my own kids.
If I think that there’s a reasonable chance that I and the other survivors can make a go of it, I’m leaving with them. Yes, that endangers my kids–but I don’t trust my kids to be safe growing up around these horrible people anyway, and if I’m going to give my kids a good life, it’s gotta be away both from those racists and from a dad haunted by the vision of the people he abandoned to their deaths in order to save his own skins.
If I think those people are going to certain death, I stay, after doing everything I can to negotiate better terms for the banished people. And then I do everything I can to persuade people on the inside to change their policies, most likely through telling stories about the lives of the people they let die.
If I leave, I’ll try to take as many of the racists with me as I can. I don’t mean kill them; I mean try to persuade them to come with us to start a new community. Safety in numbers indeed.
If it were just me, it wouldn’t be a question: I don’t value my own life enough to hang around with evil people all the time. But my kids drastically complicate the equation.
That happens, one suspects, even if the zombies consume one who is unsuccessfully attempting to flee. Do the zombies offer full membership in the ravening horde to candidates who are composed primarily of zombie poop?
My answer depends:
If it is just me, with no family, then I stay with my group and leave the racists behind. My principles are more important to me than my personal safety. Also, I have enough confidence in myself to think I could help my group figure out a viable living arrangement.
However, if I have a family with me, and particularly small children, then I stay with the racists. Now it’s no longer just about me and my principles. I have loved ones have to care for, so I have to choose the option which best ensures their survival. My hope would be to leave the racists at some future point if things in the wider world become more stable.
Are the folks getting rejected – are any of them kids? Because that’d be a pretty strenuous part of my negotiations with the racists, if any are. Watching my kids stay, and some other kids leave, would be rough.
Would it be rougher than watching all the kids, including yours, suffer and die?
Get bitten?
They haven’t hurt you, or your group.
I don’t see a reason to slaughter a group of bigots unless they have done harm to you or someone else. Which they have not, in** Skald’s** scenario. This is a live and let live situation, IMHO.
JAQ has made it very clear that, in this particular hypothetical, he would rather everyone die than that people who do not live up to his moral standards should survive. He almost certainly considers himself quite the liberal and enlightened 21st century man. He believes that slaughtering the people who saved his entire party makes him the better person.
Needs must when the flesh-eating hordes are at the chain-link fence. There will be time enough to remake the world in its proper race-egalitarian, feminist, QUILTBAG-friendly mould once the zombies are overcome - and if they’re not, most other concerns will appear rather trivial.
No. It wouldn’t. Thanks for asking.
But the survivor’s guilt I’d experience would be a helluva lot greater if there were kids in the group that left, to the extent that I’d feel a thoroughly irrational temptation to go off and die with the rejected group rather than live with that guilt.
Except in this case the racists aren’t “live and let live”, “…but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one of them” “we’re happier with our own kind, they’re happier with their own kind” “Bob at the plant is OK, but the rest of them…”. They’re “Get the fuck out of our compound and get eaten by zombies”.
The point of the hypothetical is that the expelled people are being cast out into almost certain death. If they could just walk across the railroad tracks to the other side of town to the survivalist enclave that accepts their kind, then it’s not much of a hypothetical.
So these aren’t benign racists. They’re Nazi concentration camp guard style racists. You’ve arrived at the Nazi death camp, and you’ve been given a choice: guard or prisoner.