What's your opinion? We'd like to know. (tm)

[surrealestate]

If you need to expand on your answers, you can leave a comment. As always, anonymous comments are enabled.

[Poll #1371263]

Comments

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Dead veterans are more likely to trigger outrage than zombies on Easter. People care less about Jesus than Grandpa.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

this.

[ron_newman]

But not an issue unless the march passes by a cemetery where veterans are buried. These are much easier to avoid than churches.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And for people who have loved ones serving in war zones, it may be hard to appreciate a zombie march on Memorial Day.

both are offensive

[cthulhia]

but, I guess easter more so since I will be out of town that weekend spending time with family.

Maybe if they held it on the nearest full moon, around sunset, that would be way cooler. >.>

[ifotismeni]

i think both are offensive to be honest. not "get up all in arms and huffy puffy" offensive, but just "severely poor taste" offensive.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

You've clearly never seen Zombie Soldiers

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

oops, replied to wrong person :D

[gilana]

The point of Easter is that Jesus died and was resurrected. Is there something I don't know about our veterans...?

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

They died and weren't?

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I feel like "rising from the dead" and "Easter" are things that are actually often mentioned in the same sentence.

Seriously, I actually care a lot more about whether people are hurt (which I can imagine a parent or kid of a vet being by people pretending to be undead soldiers) than whether they're offended (which is what I imagine people would be by undead Jesus jokes).

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

Jesus invented zombies, so that makes it very appropriate.

It would make more sense to have this on a non-holiday/day of note though. The organizers were not thinking very well.

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

this. Personally, I don't know if I'd call it offensive, but I do think it's kinda like screaming "hey Christians! Here's what we think of your Jesus!"

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

I will say one thing. A zombie McCain is always in good taste.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

People *were* offended, though. On both sides, even, oddly enough, though for very different reasons.

[skreeky]

I totally didn't make any connection between zombies and the Christ resurrection AT ALL and I was raised extremely religious Xtian. It took me several minutes to figure out why this the least bit offensive to anyone, unless it's the whole "pretending to be zombies and witches and things is satanic and therefore evil" tripe that we got on Halloween, and that would apply equally any day of the year, so, Huh? Or maybe they're offended because we're supposed to be in church that day, not running around having fun?

Even after I made the connection between Undead and Resurrection, I'm still not really seeing why this is offensive. No one is saying that Christ (believed to be real and truly raised from the dead to be a fully living person again) is a Zombie (a completely fictional being that is a dead body being animated by supernatural forces having nothing to do with the person whose body that was when it was alive).

I really do think that some people Get Offended simply because they enjoy Being Offended. It's a terrific way to feel superior to other people, after all.

--

Compare to Memorial Day, which is about mourning death, not celebrating eternal life - here I can see the offensiveness because making light of death on a day when there is so much pain regarding it belittles the sorrow. It's not quite as bad as Zombie-ing through an actual funeral procession, but the spirit is the same.

[skreeky]

I must add, though, that I'm hearing a rumor that the day was picked intentionally for the purpose of pissing off Christians, and while some people may find that fun, it's not really my cup of tea to go around intentionally offending random people who have done nothing to hurt me. (And no, not ALL Christians believe that gays are bad and Republicans are good and we ought to go around killing Muslims. It's just that the ones that do believe those things are REALLY LOUD.)

I may have low tolerance, as seen in previous comment, for people who Take Offense where none was intended. However, Taking Offense when it WAS intended is an entirely different thing.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Both are offensive, IMHO.

And even more offensive is the attempted back-pedaling by the organizers to try and suggest that Easter sunday really is all about Ostara as a resurrection themed event.

Funny, Ostara isn't celebrated on the first sunday after the 14th day of the new moon after 21 March, it's celebrated as close to the equinox as possible.

His justification is so much CYA.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Oh, he knew he was full of it with the Ostara stuff. I think he believes he was being clever there.

To me, though, which one is more offensive in the sense of potentially being *actually hurtful* seems like a no-brainer, though obviously the opinion isn't unanimous.

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have thought a zombie march funny. Fun, perhaps but not funny.

It never occurred to me either that a Memorial Day zombie march might be offensive. After all, zombies aren't dead, just undead, and Memorial Day remembers people who have given their lives in service to their country. It isn't a remember the dead day, per se. Whereas Easter commemorates someone who died and rose from the dead, and I would find the suggestion that he is zombie-like offensive.

Of course, you know my bias.

[ron_newman]

for Memorial Day, there's a distinction between the original official Memorial Day (May 30) and the day it's actually observed (last Monday in May, this year May 25).

Somerville has its Memorial Day parade on the Sunday of that weekend (this year, May 24). It goes through Davis Square, so any conflicting event that day would be a bad idea.

Cambridge's Memorial Day parade is a much smaller deal than Somerville's. I think it occurs on the observed Monday, and passes through Harvard Square.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

OK. I get it...people want to alt.tasteless.march.zombie. Ha Ha. We got the joke. Only to those who will be observing the holidays, notsofunny. I think it's important to respect that.
What happened to fun, random zombie flashmobs?

Memorial Day? Come over to the Park Plaza Hotel. LeakyCon will be going on so there will be plenty of costumed Witches and Wizards to fight the Inferi.

[dpolicar]

I can't answer "which is more offensive". Easter is more offensive to people who identify more with Jesus than with soldiers; Memorial Day for those who identify more with soldiers than with Jesus.

If you mean "which one offends Dave more"... neither one particularly offends me.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Easter is more offensive to people who identify more with Jesus than with soldiers; Memorial Day for those who identify more with soldiers than with Jesus.

I don't agree. I'm Jewish, but that doesn't mean any given Jewish joke offends me more than any [insert-someting-I'm-not] joke. The guys quoted in this article are probably "closer to Jesus" than anyone posting here, but they don't seem to be offended.

[spatch]

My something else answer was "dumb". I can't bother to be outraged or overly offended or righteously indignant or any other emotion. I share no conspiratorial giggling with those who think it'll be soooo great to "mess with the mundanes" or think this is really gonna sock it to those Christians (or Xtians or whatever.) But on the other hand, I also share no desire to attend Easter services and I'm of a denomination which holds 'em.

And I find neither Easter nor Memorial Day to be offensive, either, though I am sure in some alternate pocket of this reality there's someone who feels the same way about those holidays as I feel about the holiday zombie marches.

I fully admit to feeling quite curmudgeonly about the entire situation, honestly.

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

Personally I find them a little funny, and a touch offensive, but I think the latter is me projecting more than anything else - and I can see more potential to "go over the top". A zombie dressed as a soldier, modern or otherwise, would be in poor taste, and hurtful to some.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

What I hate most is that they've taken a fun and harmless flash mob/cosplay tradition and turned it into such an offensive gesture. It's not enough to have fun; the fun had to be at someone's expense (the Christians). It think it fucking sucks that zombie marches in this neighborhood might be spoiled because of this.

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Well, it seems to me that a lot of Christians would think it was funny and not get hung up on it. I might test that theory on my mother, actually. If I do, I'll tell you what she says.

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

I'm sure many would, you're absolutely right. And that is completely irrelevant and entirely misses the point.

A zombie march that targets a specific group of people, say Christians on their holiest holiday, for ridicule has the potential for negative repercussions on both sides. It's a lose-lose situation. As plumtreeblossom has pointed out, zombie marches are a fun and harmless flash mob sort of thing. Somerville is an open and accepting place where this sort of thing is generally well received. Christians in this area tend to be more liberal-minded and accepting. To some it's the natural thing to accept all peoples. Others are well-meaning but struggle to accept behavior they feel runs counter to their beliefs, yet they make the effort to try to accept all people because we're supposed to love and not judge. Flash mob behavior is an alternative lifestyle choice, and some will lump all perceived "alternative" lifestyles (flash-mobbing, LARPing, poly, same-sex partnerships, etc.) together into one category. So along comes a group of people marching as zombies deliberately on the day these Christians celebrate their Christ's resurrection, and it doesn't take a great leap of logic to for some to conclude that their lifestyle is being mocked, ridiculed, attacked. And they might feel offended, or even hurt and betrayed, depending on their level of activism in liberal causes. And they might begin to wonder why they make such an effort to accept "people like this," to convince their narrower-minded churchgoers that these folk are just normal folk with different ways of living. They might wonder, for example, why they bothered showing up at Cambridge Rindge and Latin a few weeks ago if this is the thanks they get. So maybe they stop giving money to some of these causes. And so on.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But the potential most certainly exists. An event like this on a date like that is pushing a lot of buttons, and the expectation that folks won't or shouldn't be offended or that there won't or couldn't be broader repercussions is just plain naïve. Why do something that logic tells you is likely to generate ill-will, that if it has any positive aspects to it, those are very limited in scope? And do the organizers really want to make a political statement that could come back and bite them in the ass? Are alternative issues such as same-sex marriage (the dots are easier to connect than you may acknowledge) standing on such firm political footing that they can afford to piss off potential allies? Overblown, you say, yet all big to-dos grew from small seeds such as this. The whole thing is poorly considered, unnecessary, and easily avoided.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

I think Jesus stands up to the inference of fun being made better than somebody's dead grampa does. I think it would take a delicate and creative touch to make either one likely to be enjoyable for everyone.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

You forgot a question.

Which is funnier?

My answer is Easter.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Easter is brilliant -- it makes sense!

My only issue about Memorial Day is that most Americans don't know which war it commemorates. It honors the dead of the Civil War and it was originally called Decoration Day.

I'd say that a zombie march on Memorial Day should have an extra piece: march to a graveyard that has dead soldiers. Make it part of the gig that the zombies come to the entrance, go in and stop. They are at peace with being dead again.

Cuz, like, we still have two wars we're running. We're starting a new front in Mexico. Every time the live soldiers come home, we tell them to repress it and get on with living. We have walking zombies and we pretend they were just out of town for a while.

Why not do something useful with a zombie march?

Sorry to get all serious.