Dialing 9-1-1 just won’t help you.  Emergency response systems are overwhelmed and it’s just you and your brick of an iPhone waiting for the senseless chaos just outside your window to shamble up the sidewalk and claw at your front door.  Do you know how to kill a zombie?  What about a vampire?  When your survival depends on information which never before seemed relevant, you’re gonna wish you took a post-apocalyptic preparedness class.  But where can one register for such a class?  Not at UIS.

We cannot take lightly the threat from ostensibly fictional forces of darkness.  Take note of a case this time last year which occurred outside of a Hooters in St. Petersburg, Florida.

According to reports from the perennial patriarch of truth, TheSmokingGun.com, Josephine Smith, 22, was arrested and charged with felony aggravated battery on an elderly person.  “I’m a vampire, I am going to eat you,” Smith announced before allegedly attacking Milton Ellis.

Or take the more recent “Miami Zombie” incident (mislabeled by some as the “Naked Cannibal”), which took place this past March.  According to CNN.com, a naked man was seen by motorists and passers by walking down a busy Miami street before dragging a homeless person “out from the shade, stripping the victim’s clothes off and then beating him as the victim kicks his legs in an apparent attempt to fight back.”  The naked zombie then proceeded to eat the helpless man’s face while several more bystanders passed curiously by.  Police blamed bath salts.  I think we all know better.

Lastly, consider the recent moratorium on bird flu experiments.  Nell Greenfield-Boyce of NPR.org wrote, “One of the main concerns surrounding [experimental bird-flu] research is the threat of accidental release if the mutant bird flu experiments get repeated in labs around the world that do not have the same security and safety precautions that are mandated by the United States.”

“This issue has been raised but there has been no discussion of how to deal with it,” said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose lab did one of the controversial experiments.

Last time I checked, Madison is only five hours north of here.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have seen I Am Legend (the book is better) but the premise of the movie is this: there is a guy doing experimental research on cancer vaccines and, of course, mutant virus + hubris = post-apocalyptic world populated by flesh eating mutants and a dwindling human race (flesh eating mutant food supply) racing toward the hills.

We have concrete, verifiable cases of vampire and zombie attacks which illustrate the devastating consequences of a myopic worldview and the seeds of chaos have already been planted:  disbelief, dysfunctional measures for pathogenic response and containment, experimental research on mutant viruses, ignorance in the face of explicit self-reliance and survival.

It’s about time we learn how to fish.  It’s about time UIS offers a course on Post-Apocalyptic Preparedness.