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[surrealestate]

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[Poll #1371263]

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[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.