“If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.” ― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Theme: war
Max Brook's depiction of the future is like many others, revolves around a zombie apocalypse brought on by a virus of some sort due to human causes. In this quote, they focus on the war of the worlds aspect of the future. Nearly every country at this point in time is at war with one another, and they're so focused on each other they failed to be ready for the zombie attack. At first, the countries tried to keep the zombies a secret, then it started to get out. However, many countries thought it was a prank, or a joke at first until they were plagued with zombies too. He uses parallelism and repetition to get the point across that we were all too busy standing apart, and fighting each other to notice something so huge it could potentially destroy the human population, and cause an extinction of the human species. Brooks' tries to show the selfishness of the human race and their unwillingness to help each other out in a time of crisis, but in a larger scale. He tries to warn us about our fighting, and wars between countries and he's implying that it will never end, no matter what is going on around us, and even if humans as a whole are under attack.
