“Did you exchange…a walk-on part in a war…for a lead role in
a cage?”
~Pink Floyd from Wish You Were Here
Humans will never fly.
No one will ever climb Mt. Everest.
It is impossible to run less than a 4 minute mile.
We will never make it to the moon.
We will never find a cure for polio.
Mars is out of our reach.
We should just forget it.
There is a show that I occasionally watch, but usually just
while I am channel surfing. It’s called “The
Walking Dead” and I know some people are completely addicted to it. Sometimes I
stay and enjoy the story and plot, but when the “walkers” show up, I am on the
move to find something like Andy Griffith to clean out my short term
memory. For some reason I stayed on a
certain episode today. For devoted fans, it was the one where they entered the
Centers for Disease Control and found out the nature and origin of the disease.
As a science teacher (one that actually
attempted a unit on zombies), I was intrigued at how the zombies came to
be. Without getting too deep in the
science, let me just say that the disease or virus kills the individual. But some part of their brain “awakens” after a
few hours. It is mostly the brain stem, the part that controls unconscious actions.
Thus the walkers are, in a sense, alive
but not really. They function only to
move and feed and are exactly what the title suggests: walking dead.
The only way to kill them again is to destroy that part of the brain.
What intrigued me most was not the brain science, but the
attitude of the individuals who were trying to survive. The CDC was wired to explode in a ball of fire
when its power reserves ran out, and the sole surviving CDC employee was ready
to go up in flames and take the survivors with him. The survivors knew that outside were starving
zombies, but for some reason they could not buy into the idea of choosing a
quick and easy death to avoid the conflict outside. I left the house for a while to clear my head
of zombie images. After walking and jogging at the track, I started
to understand the strength, perseverance, tenacity, and courage of the human
spirit.
A teacher fighting a diagnosis of cancer after being told
there is no hope. An athlete pushing
herself for the next race or a faster time or a new goal. A college student
barely scraping by with a part-time job and mounting college loans to become a
doctor. A mountain climber reaching the
top of Mt. Everest and saying “What next?”
An astronaut taking “one small step for mankind.” A paraplegic striving to walk again even
though science says it’s impossible.
As the Pink Floyd song describes, there are many individuals
who choose to live their lives in a cage and never strive to get out. It is comfortable in the cage; no unknowns to
fear. “Just give me my food and water and TV remote and make me comfortable and
I will be just fine.” All the while, the key to the cage hangs nearby, ready to
secure their freedom. Only a few brave
individuals choose to open the door and take their part in this war called
life. When you enter a war, there is
great possibility of death at every turn. But there is also the key--the key to
independence. As I write this on July 4th,
I will not forget the ones who fought in many wars to gain our freedom. They chose
to truly live to give us life, sometimes at the cost of their own.
So in the end, it is important to check yourself. Are you in the multitude of the walking dead?
Or are you in the minority… in the small but dedicated group that chooses to
strive for more against all odds. As
long as there is hope, there will always be a human spirit that seeks to climb
the next mountain, cure the next disease, or meet the next goal.
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