Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Dead eyes


Do you know what is one thing that is scary to me? A dead person’s eyes...especially when they are open...and moving around and blinking and seem like they should be alive...but they aren’t. That gives me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach and, sometimes, I have to turn away. The worst is when the person doesn’t know that they are dead. They don’t know any better and so they walk around pretending like they are alive. Maybe, it’s all a grand scheme to make sure people don’t bury them.
Perhaps "dead" isn’t quite the right word. Maybe it is more like "undead." I’m sure that calls to mind zombies and such, but these are real. I see them walking around every day.
Maybe, if they knew they were dead they would go find their rest and find the life that is waiting for them there. But they don’t and no one has the courage to tell them that they aren’t alive.
“But I go to church...I have a life...I have my friends...I tweet nine times a day. A dead person can’t do that.”
But can’t they?
Can’t even a robot with no life in it at all tweet nine times a day and sit in a building and keep a log of what is happening around it? It still has no life in it. A robot can’t have passions, joys, pain, love. A robot can’t have moral integrity. It can have a program that tells it to accept and reject certain things based on a list of criteria, but then it can just be programmed to do whatever whoever is skilled enough to program it wants it to. It has no choice.
Some of these undead people seem to do just that. If something is viral on social media, it must be worth attention. If five people they know like something, it must be good. If it lines up with the thoughts they were taught in school, then surely it is right. Their foundation is only as solid as those external parameters that they have been taught. Those are not lasting - and even if it were, if that undead person’s external circumstances change, that person’s identity changes, their principles change.
Sometimes, despite my squeamishness at dead eyes, I want to get in one of their faces and yell, just to see if it elicits any response other than an eye roll and filing me away in their brain as an odd creature. Perhaps I am one, but at least I am alive.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. I've been wondering lately if the "zombie" craze isn't about the rejection of eternal life. Something like C.S. Lewis's Men Without Chests.

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  3. Hmmm. this is related http://aprincessofthebears.blogspot.com/2010/08/which-is-more-dead.html

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  4. It is one of the hardest things, to try to converse with a person like that, maybe even harder to witness people dying in that way while not knowing how to wake them up to live.

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