by an anonymous member of the vitality-challenged community

You humans have the undead all wrong. For decades, we have suffered your misconceptions, your discrimination, prejudice and persecution. I say no more!

All this started when George A. Romero decided to spew his hatred by creating movies like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, perpetuating stereotypes that have plagued my people for generations. These films depicted us as slow-moving, braindead corpses with an insatiable desire for flesh.

Mister Romero, allow me to retort.

Really? Humans are that tasty? Have you ever bit into raw human flesh? Let me tell you: it ain’t all that great. I mean, sure, it fills us up in a pinch, but it’s really all we can eat: imagine being perpetually stuck in an airport terminal where the only dining option is a Bennigan’s To Go. By the way, I do pilates every Monday and Wednesday, and I know people in the pseudo-dead community who ran track in high school. Is that what you call “stiff” or “slow”? But it’s when you call us braindead where I feel truly offended. I mean I just graduated from the University of Phoenix. Besides, let’s not forget which race nearly elected a crazy masturbating witch and continues to pay attention to Jersey Shore. Job well done, mankind.

Our plight has only worsened in recent years! Anyone remember “Thriller”? Fuck you, Michael Jackson. How dare you degrade us to the level of backup dancers. And movies like Shaun of the Dead actually turn the unabashed genocide of my proud people into comedy! Games like Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead just continue to glorify this terrorism. When will the madness stop? Why do you shoot, bludgeon and bomb us, when our only crime was having weak immune systems that made us fall victim to a virus that killed and subsequently reanimated us? WHY??

You humans insist on stomping on my fellow living dead at every available opportunity. I, on behalf of the mortality-challenged community, demand these changes, effective immediately:

• “Quarantine” is just a technical word for “segregation.” We demand equal access to all public places, especially shopping malls and rural farming towns.
• We demand an immediate moratorium on the usage of the “Z” word. This incredibly offensive and derogatory term has been around for far too long.
• Stop the bloodshed. Give up your guns, chainsaws and blunt objects. We promise to play nice…

My point is that I wake up and put my pants on one leg at a time before devouring a newborn child’s brain just like anybody else. Why can’t we all just get along?